Mr. Speaker, having spent my first two years in Parliament as part of the finance committee and the chief finance critic, I certainly appreciate the opportunity to speak today on the finance report. For me, and I am sure for many others, the state of the nation's finances is a matter of utmost importance and certainly the number one issue that must be dealt with.
In the time I have today I will ask some simple questions: Where are we now and how did we get there? Who do we point at to answer those questions? Only after we have answered the where and the how can we tackle the most important question: What do we do next?
Let us begin with where we are now. The government is still going into debt but not as fast as before. It still overspends but not quite as much. It still overtaxes but it is more clever in disguising that fact.
In 1996-97 the government will spend $25 billion more than it has. In 1997-98 it will spend $17 billion more than it has. Sadly some people call this progress. I call it irresponsibility.
The finance minister is lowering the deficit but not quickly enough. Yes, he is making cuts but in 1997, not today. Yes, he is making an effort to put our house in order, but it is a half hearted effort that could come undone with the blink of an eye.
The government is playing a risky game with its go slow fiscal criteria and agenda. A recession, a secession crisis that could happen or rising interest rates, any one of those events could unwind three years of progress in a matter of days, sending us right back to where the government started at the beginning of the 35th session of Parliament, with a $40 billion to $44 billion deficit.
The government is deeply in debt, uncertain of its course, lacking in conviction and drifting at sea. How do we explain it? What accounts for this uncertainty, this sense of drifting and this ocean of debt that is drowning the federal government?
I have observed the following. The Liberals who came to office in 1993 were believers. They believed in the ideology, the philosophy and the cause of Liberalism. I must say when I compare the environment of the House of Commons with the environment of the Alberta legislature, in which I spent 28 and a half years, Liberalism was not alive in the Alberta legislature. However Liberalism is alive in the House of Commons. I cannot believe that Liberalism exists in the country in the way it does.
The Liberals who are leading the country believe in the same cause as their predecessors. The Trudeaus, the Martins and the Pearsons constructed a massive social welfare state, attempting to coddle all their citizens from cradle to grave.
What did these welfare Liberals really believe? They believed in governing from the top down instead of the bottom up. We are suffering from that. They believed in centralizing control instead of keeping it close to the people. They believed in governments running people instead of people running governments. The results of this approach were very predictable.
First, social programs fostered dependency rather than self-reliance. Business subsidies tilted the playing field instead of fostering competition. Paternalistic policies stifled initiative instead of creating opportunity. Because they believed that government could do a better job of managing people's lives than the people could, the welfare Liberals never hesitated to fund social engineering through higher and higher tax rates.
That is the legacy the Liberals inherited upon their election and are continuing to build on: an outdated, discredited welfare state that could no longer afford the vision of its creator. Yet the Liberals
who campaigned on the red book in 1993 were the children of that legacy. They believed in this vision. They came to the House believing that it worked. They believed it wholeheartedly, even after it was proved to be wrong.
In reality it cannot be avoided forever, even in Ottawa. When the truth of my last statement finally sank in, when the truth of chronic unemployment, economic dependency and runaway debt became too indisputable to deny, they discovered they had lost their bearings.
These fervent believers who sailed into office on the HMS red book discovered that the Liberal philosophy which had anchored their beliefs was gone, discredited and sunk. They awoke to find themselves drifting, lost at sea and drowning in an ocean of debt. That is why the government spent its first two years in office doing nothing. Discovering that the welfare state had crumbled under its own weight, they found they had no other vision to take its place, nothing at all, no replacement.
Now they have become half hearted warriors, deficit fighters, by default. They reduce the deficit without conviction or understanding. They do it without a vision or a goal. They do it not because it is the right thing to do, but because they do not know what else to do.
The finance minister spent two long years on the road to Damascus before he had his own fiscal conversion, two years of continuous warnings from the Reform Party, international investors, academics, the IMF, the auditor general and the Bank of Canada, just to bring him to grips with fiscal reality. He believed that those bodies were not authorities that knew what they were doing. They did. While he has now experienced a half hearted conversion to the benefits of deficit reduction, he is rowing against the tide in his own Liberal caucus. That is most unfortunate.
Tax and spend dinosaurs like the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Human Resources Development, the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, and the Prime Minister are still clinging to the wreckage of their ideology like a drowning man clings to driftwood.
The finance minister is desperate to keep his government's head above water, yet these 1960s Liberals are hung around his neck like an albatross, dragging him down. They will certainly drag the country down fiscally as well.
There is a bitter irony here. These children of the welfare state are drowning in an ocean of debt that they themselves have created.
Let us look at the alternative, and there certainly are some alternatives. It is the Reform Party. What do we present to Canadians? Reform knows what to do and we know why it must be done. Reform has an end vision. We know why deficit reduction is important and where it will lead. It will lead to jobs and business opportunities in Canada.
Reform's vision includes the elimination of deficits and a reduction in debt. It is unbelievable that our debt grows at $1,000 per second. Can anyone imagine putting $1,000 on the table every second of the day and night? It is beyond belief that happens but that is the kind of debt we have. It expands at the rate of $1,000 per second.
We believe in lowering borrowing costs both for the government and the people and in lowering tax levels, leaving more money in the pockets of Canadians. We believe in social programs that offer a hand up, not a handout. We believe in a society where everyone believes they have an opportunity to grow, prosper and learn in a safe and secure environment.
That is the vision Canadians so desperately need. That is the vision of the Reform Party and that is the vision the Liberal government does not have.