Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his comments. Let me respond on two fronts. I believe the member's comments demonstrate exactly what I was saying, that with all due respect the Bloc members do not have the foggiest notion as to how to balance a budget.
With respect to unpaid taxes, we could collect all the unpaid taxes referred to in the Auditor General's report, the $5 billion to $6 billion, every one of them, and we would not even help the finance minister to get up to his soft target. He needs $6 billion to $9 billion.
This idea that they can tax our way out of the problem we are in, either in Canada as a whole or in Quebec, is completely fallacious. Any government that attempts to do that will turn itself into the most highly taxed jurisdiction in Canada. If they followed their advice they would end up having the most highly taxed jurisdiction in Canada.
On the second point, that Reform goes after all the things that people hold dear, the $10 billion in spending reductions that we advocated in front of the finance committee are outside the social area. That is one of the reasons for focusing there first. Second, I challenge this whole thesis. It has been people who said: "Don't reduce your spending because all these things are sacred" in many other countries that have helped destroy those very things they said were sacred. They let the debt get higher and they let the interest on the debt get higher until it eroded every social service they considered important.
My point, and I conclude with this, is that to demonstrate social concern today is not to use the rhetoric of the 1930s that we need more social programs. It is to come up with ways of making essential social services financially sustainable. That is the social conscience of the 1990s.