The member for Calgary Centre wants one of those trees. We all do. Those days are long gone. We have found that we were not actually even paying for those programs at that point. We were only using borrowed money to pay for them. Now the chickens have come home to roost and the country has a massive debt.
I have talked about some of the values. People want equal treatment. They want the merit principle in all of their legislation and in all of their laws. They believe in prudence. They are compassionate and want those programs directed toward the people who need them the most.
I wish to talk about those values in the context of the current situation. The situation is certainly not ideal. It would be wonderful if we could go back and wipe the slate clean and build new institutions based on some of these principles we have talked about, but we cannot do that.
We are in a situation today where we are really in a huge hole. The debate is $570 billion. Something like 44 per cent of the total federal and provincial debt is foreign owned. In a very real way a great deal of our sovereignty as a nation has been lost as a result of that.
The deficit will be somewhere around $32 billion this year. In other words, we are going to go into the hole another $32 billion. By the end of its mandate the government will have gone into the hole by another $100 billion.
If interest rates are 6 per cent or 7 per cent, it means it is going to be $6 billion or $7 billion, but that is only at the end of it. Over that period interest has also been accumulating and it would probably be much higher than that, say $11 billion or $12 billion.
Because we have waited so long, it means we are going to have to cut a lot deeper into our social programs. It means we cannot hold out any hope for tax relief for Canadians for a long time. People are crying for some relief from taxes.
If I may touch on our current situation, by the end of the mandate Canadians will be paying $51 billion a year in interest on the debt, about 37 cents of every tax dollar. That is a tremendous amount of money to devote just to paying interest.
Furthermore, we are mired in an unemployment rut. Unemployment now is about 9.4 per cent. A lot of people would argue that the biggest single reason for that high unemployment rate is the tremendous drag on the economy because of that massive debt and deficit.
Hon. members across the way say we should have a job creation program. The auditor general has slagged the government for these job creation programs because they do not work. All they do is add to the debt and that makes the situation worse.
All of these problems have to be looked at. We have to figure out how we can address them, using some of the values I have talked about just a minute ago.
I wish to talk a little more about our current situation. The Canada pension plan is in serious trouble, about $500 billion in debt. Taxes are rocketing up. In fact, they have gone up more in this country than in any other G-7 nation over the last several years. The situation is very serious.
I will conclude by pointing out that as members go home for Christmas and sit down with their families, with their children and grandchildren, they should remember exactly why we are in this place. We are here not to serve only our generation, but also to right all the wrongs that we are loading on to the shoulders of the next generation.
May I suggest that down the road what people really want is not a budget. What they want is some confidence that they will be able to retire some day, that they will be able to find a job, that they will be able to have enough money in their pockets after taxes so that they can put their kids through university. It is those human things that ordinary people desire every day. When you talk to people around the country this is what they tell you they want. This is my recommendation to the finance minister.
As we close, may I wish all the members in this place a very merry Christmas and all the best in the new year.