Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your intervention. All of us are on a learning curve. I certainly am as one of the new people here and I appreciate your comment.
Remember the amount of $2,200 is needed from each one of us just to pay the interest on the debt. We are not even touching the principal. As a result, the cumulative debt of the federal and provincial levels of government is growing at a rate of $60 billion a year and the compounding continues. The pattern has persisted for years. Is calling this situation a fiscal cancer an overstatement? What would you call it?
And let us remember: Politicians did not do this. Governments did not do this. Civil servants did not do this. We prosperous, peaceful, common sense Canadians did this to ourselves.
Whatever the party or prime minister or finance minister, the Government of Canada has not had a single balanced budget in 20 years. During the same period there have been scores of budgets in the provinces. Relatively few provincial treasuries have forecast a balanced budget and only rarely have they achieved their targets.
Of course, we have had elections; 83 different occasions on which the people could exercise their democratic right to choose national and provincial governments. We had all those opportunities to change policy directions. We have elected Liberal, Progressive Conservative, New Democrat, Social Credit and Parti Quebecois governments. We have given them variously majority or minority mandates. We have even had from time to time intense national debates about debt and deficits, but our total debt has continued to soar even higher.
He talks about Canadians and says:
We have only ourselves to blame. Most experienced politicians, I would guess a solid majority in every cabinet in the country, will confess privately that there is no constituency for cutting spending. Canadians may be in favour of cutting somebody else's special interest spending but not their own. The result has been an endless procession of impossibly conflicting instructions to our political leadership: Cut spending, but not on this; save money, but not on that.
I like this guy. He goes on to say:
Pity our politicians. It would have taken the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job to respond to such a conflicting cry and neither of them had to get elected.
Government spending problems are too often oversimplified as being a question of inefficiency. Some say that the problem can be resolved by reducing spending in all current categories. That would help but it is only the beginning. The real problem is that many government programs are outdated and it is not just that we are spending too much, it is that we are spending on the wrong things.
The real problem in my judgment is that we as politicians have a responsibility to talk straight to our constituents. During the last election it perplexed me whenever the Reform Party would talk straight and say we must drive the deficit to zero in as quick a period of time as possible that we were attacked by the
Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives as being the slash and spend and hack and cut party.
The reality is that we in Canada are at the wall. We have managed to get away with this infrastructure spending, or should I say borrowing, this transfer of intergenerational debt to my grandchildren who I have never seen and are not even born and their descendants, all for the sake of some election sloganeering.
It is the responsibility of all politicians no matter what their stripe to generate a culture of acceptance to the fact that it is going to hurt. It is going to hurt me, it is going to hurt you, Mr. Speaker, and it is going to hurt the people who are listening to this debate or reading it in Hansard . It is going to hurt. We fundamentally have a choice of doing it to ourselves under our control, or letting some external force do it to us.
Today the finance minister stood in this place and very forcefully and very eloquently said: "We will maintain control". How can you maintain control when you continue to spend $110 million a day more than you have coming in? It is impossible. You cannot maintain control in a world where there is such a thing as compound interest and in this instance compound debt. When we are spending $110 million a day that we do not have, we are simply transferring what we are doing in 1994 to somebody way out there somewhere else.
I conclude my comments with a quick review. Bill C-52 is going in the right direction for all of the right reasons. If you will pardon me for nit-picking, I happened to notice in our review that a part of the purpose was that the deputy minister be appointed by cabinet.
It strikes me that the deputy ministers of all departments are people of great importance and strength. They give direction to their departments and strong counsel to their ministers. I suggest that the deputy minister not just in Bill C-52 but in other bills should appear before the standing committee. There should be more public scrutiny because more and more power is falling into the hands of the top civil servants. That would be a healthy thing to do.
In summary we are going in the right direction with Bill C-52. I do support that direction. I do see all of the things the last member was talking about, but it is not good enough by a long shot. We as politicians must generate a culture of acceptance of the fact that we are living beyond our means. We must be straight up with our voters. We must convince Canadians that we will be able to go in the right direction.