Mr. Speaker, I thank the second opposition party for tabling what can be called a shadow budget. It becomes part of a general dialectical process of discussion that the finance minister launched some months ago and which has been highlighted by discussions of citizens' groups, household groups, learned society groups, all people putting in ideas and suggestions to the government to help the finance minister in preparing for his budget that he will table in the next week.
Members will pardon me, though, if I say-it is not intended as a criticism-that one finds in the feedback from the various groups consulted, and we could say this is true of the shadow budget from the second opposition party, that it is formulated at a fairly high level of generality and abstraction, that it lacks the tethering detail of examining concrete cases against an empirical record which is the responsibility of a government.
One is reminded of General Secretary Khrushchev celebrated rebuke to the Albanians. I will not translate what he said in Russian exactly. He referred, I think we can say in English, to people jabbering. Basically it says: "Look, it is one thing to talk without having responsibility but when you have to make decisions you have to point out concretely what this means".
In other words, if we have suggestions to make and we do not want cutbacks in our own backyard, whom would we want to cut and why? What are the criteria?
It is very easy to say without responsibility for the government that one would eliminate $40 billion or $50 billion from federal spending in three years, but a government has to justify that in the concrete cases and examine what cuts in one sector of the budget would do to other sectors of the budget and, second, what impact it would all have on federal-provincial relations which without necessarily any action other than from historical forces is with us again as a key issue in the next few years, the Quebec issue to mention only one of these things.
We were warned during the last general election by financial analysts of some reputation and by the International Monetary Fund that reckless and radical financial restructuring without proper attention to empirical detail would have unforeseen effects on unemployment and on the economy.
This is why the government, as its first approach to the budget, recognizes the basic truth that any budget is a balancing act. It requires balancing competing interests, social and economic interests, choosing between them and offering justification for that.
As a government we are charged with keeping Canada together. We have to recognize the conflict in economic attitudes in many parts of the country. For the economically dynamic western provinces in which my own seat is located this means cutting the deficit as top priority. In Quebec and the Atlantic provinces we are getting the message that jobs may have a higher priority than that. We have to balance those interests.
Our predecessor government, the Mulroney government that has disappeared into history, had a fixation on cutting without serious consideration of the revenue side of the balance sheet. To take one example, some economists estimate that each public sector job results in seven spinoff jobs in the private sector. For many companies, for better or for worse, the public sector today is their largest customer. They have to be weaned off public spending. Public sector jobs have to be cut at a pace at which the private sector can absorb them.
Coming back to the budget and the balancing of interests, there is a little bit of voodoo economics from the second opposition party. President George Bush's-