Mr. Speaker, I find it rather offensive to have comments that I have made today referred to as butchering. Something in my mind finds it rather repulsive when I think of the word butchering. I stood here and said that there is not a person in this House who does not have a compassionate heart, not one. I believe that as I stand here.
What we are involved in is a debate. Sometimes I find responding to the Liberals like playing dodge ball with a bunch of grade threes. Having said that, I would like to say that when I was growing up in my household, it was a multicultural household. My grandparents were from Norway and from Yugoslavia. While I was growing up the motto in our family was you pay for it as you go. All I am asking is that if you are going to use a
program or you want access to a part of Canada's heritage you pay for it yourself.
I am not saying anything about not coming to understand your country or coming to understand anything else about others who live here, but you pay for it yourself. That is how I grew up. I can stand here and speak from some experience in that regard because I saw my family do that. It paid as it went.
I have to tell the hon. member that there sure as heck was not very much money there sometimes either to do that but we all survived and survived very well, thank you. I have a great deal of compassion for others in this country who do come from other places in this land.
The last thing I want to say to the hon. member is that I am going to let the numbers do the talking. The federal debt accumulated in 1974 since Confederation was $25 billion. The total federal debt as of now at $535 billion-plus represents a 20-fold increase in 20 years. The total provincial debt is $186.5 billion. To say that we have to go slow and nibble at the edges, slash and burn, that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about some rational decision making and some hard choices. Believe me Canadians, the ones I talked to in my riding, are certainly ready for those kinds of actions to take place.