Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his comments. Throughout listening to him I was mystified because he talked about specifics and the need to be specific. I did not hear him give one concrete proposal on where to cut government spending.
I wonder if the hon. member would come across and be clean about it. His arguments are sound but let us talk about something specific. Let us talk about the cost of operating the civil service. We have a combination of federal and provincial government employees amounting to about 886,000 people. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business tells us that on average they are paid something like 20 per cent higher than similar private sector wage earners.
What is the member's proposal to deal with that kind of problem? Does he propose laying off civil service workers? What is his concrete proposal?