We are going to exhaust the question period.
The words in the minister's remarks that I think are the ones I can agree with are when he said: "I do not understand".
What we have had in this exchange is perhaps one of the problems of debate in this Chamber. The minister made a number of statements about the Reform Party's approach to deficit reduction in which either he misunderstands our position or we have not communicated it clearly.
Even our growth projection figures, which are based on about 3.5 per cent and which we now acknowledge are a little bit high, are not that much higher than what the minister is using. We can defend our spending reductions. We would be prepared to do this. I think the more proper forum for this-and I think the minister has invited us to do this-would be on one of these nights, away from the media, away from where we are scoring political points, for the minister to bring his officials who can roll up their sleeves, we will bring ours, and we will hash over these numbers.
I have enough faith that I think the government is seriously enough concerned about this that if we can score points in that debate and say: "Look, here is an area where something more could be done", it will listen. If we are wrong on some of these projections, we will back off on those in our public presentation. I think that is the place where we are going to make a contribution or not.
There is a second point I would like to make. I think this is where there is a philosophical difference between ourselves and the government. It is a question of how jobs are created and what is the role of the government in that versus the private sector.
I have looked at the minister's budget. I notice that when the government talks about reducing unemployment insurance premiums by $725 million to $2 billion over three years, it says the effect of that will be to create about 40,000 jobs. In other words, by leaving money in the hands of businesses and taxpayers it is going to create about 20,000 jobs per billion dollars. Then the government comes along and says: "But we are going to have an infrastructure program and we are going to tax $6 billion between the three levels of government out of those taxpayers, and we are going to reinvest that and we are going to create 65,000 jobs, in other words about 10,000 jobs per $1 billion spent".
There is an inherent contradiction in those numbers. If you can create 20,000 jobs by leaving a billion dollars in the hands of taxpayers, why would you not leave the $6 billion in the hands of those taxpayers and create that many more jobs? This is the philosophical difference between our approaches. I look forward to hashing it out.
What we are interested in, and I am sure other members are, is getting answers. We are not interested in just scoring political points on this. We want to get to what is the best way to create self-sustaining employment. If our way is better we hope you would acknowledge it; if your way is better we would be pleased to acknowledge that.