Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to all parts of the speech of the member opposite and I have a couple of comments to make and a question to ask.
At the beginning of his speech he talks about, and quite rightly, our grave concern about interest payments. He suggested that if we were responsible, somehow we should be able to eliminate it overnight. It is inappropriate that we should be incurring more debt and more interest payments tomorrow, the next day or the day after. However, I want to make it clear both to the member and to the people out there in the audience that to accomplish that tomorrow would mean we would have to cut $40 billion out of government expenditure. The member opposite is suggesting that we cut $40 billion out of the federal budget tomorrow.
That is an unreasonable approach. We want to cut the $40 billion but we are going to do it over a reasonable period of time with reasonable policies that protect individual Canadians while we are doing it, not overnight.