Mr. Speaker, the government currently has a plan to go another $100 billion into debt over the next three years with this 3 per cent figure it is talking about. It has no commitment to reduce the deficit to zero. It has a commitment only to reduce it to 3 per cent.
I heard it said by the late Kim Campbell, that is late in a political sense, during the last election that there was not any problem. If she managed to get the overspending down to whatever the number was it was fine, it was going to be balanced books because we did not have to go out and borrow money. Then after actually analyzing what she was talking about, she
was going to be using Canada pension plan contributions. She was going to be using the actual cash flow, the input that was coming into the government. That same kind of fuzzy thinking has managed to spill over. Maybe there is something unusual about that side of the House. When people move from this side, which is where most cabinet ministers were in the last House, to the other side and get cabinet positions somehow a fuzziness seems to set in.
The reality is that there is no commitment on the part of the government to control overspending. I will not call it the deficit because that is confusing. The deficit is simply how much more is spent than is taken in.
With respect to the question of targets let us talk about UI. Right now the minister of human resources is going around trying to fly all sorts of trial balloons. The Reform Party principle is very simple and very straightforward. It is called unemployment insurance.
Unfortunately all politicians in the House over the last 20 years have forgotten the word insurance. Insurance works on an actuarial basis that it is not going to be used as some kind of low grade social program. Therein lies the problem. Even today the minister and the government are working through a UI revision as though they are revising a low grade social program. They are not putting it into the arena where it should be, which is unemployment insurance.
I have a lot of other comments but the bottom line to the exercise is that there is no simple answer to the problem. I am prepared to say to the people of Canada that it is going to hurt. We can either do it ourselves or we can have it done to us. As long as we continue to add $100 billion to the debt of the nation and as long as we continue to spend $110 million every day, we are not solving the problem. We are just digging the hole deeper.