Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the number of questions he poses.
We all know the history of the debt and deficit but rather than pointing fingers back in time we should look forward in the interests of all Canadians to put forward a constructive solution. I believe that is one of the things we have done.
Another issue that my hon. colleague mentions is the division between federal and provincial responsibilities. I will take but one example that is probably very close to his heart and that is the official languages policy. We in this party and people from coast to coast, including the people in Quebec, have said that the official languages policy has been a dismal failure.
We are saying we should give language responsibility to the provinces. If every province had that responsibility then they, the people inside the province, will determine what will be the language of choice in that area. It would reflect the regional bilingualism or unilingualism of an area. It would also save the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
To reiterate, the biggest threat we have to the social programs is continued overspending. What we are trying to do, what we are obligated to do in the interests of those who are most disadvantaged in our society is to ensure that we get spending under control to enable the government to have the money to spend on them.