Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer the minister a hearty nice try on his Bill C-65. The bill is
an act to reorganize and dissolve certain federal agencies. This is good. It would be a lot better if it were just a bill to dissolve certain federal agencies.
I represent a riding with a major sea coast and my constituents will sleep better knowing that the Canadian Salt Fish Corporation has been dissolved. I also cannot express anything but pleasure at the knowledge that the National Film Board has been reduced from eight to six members. I hope it will not find itself unable to make appalling decisions due to its short staffing.
I want to say with a straight face that I am confident that the President of the Treasury Board experienced real difficulties in getting the civil service to agree to these cuts. I mean no sarcasm by saying this.
In Mr. Martin Anderson's book Revolution: The Reagan Legacy he describes his own bureaucratic battles to get rid of the board of tea tasters within the U.S. executive branch. He failed. I think the minister deserves credit for what he has done. Let us have a hearty nice try for him and then let us get serious.
How big is our spending problem? How big are our debt and deficit problems in Canada? The Liberal government appears recently to have noticed that its own lust for big government coupled with Progressive Conservative incompetence has saddled this nation with an on-book debt of over $500 billion and an unfunded liability in the Canada pension plan of about a like amount, and we continue to have annual deficits in the range of $35 billion to $40 billion.
For years the established political parties laughed the debt off: "We are creating assets. We owe it to ourselves. What is a billion? We have a culture to create". Whoops. I will tell you what a billion is. It is a one followed by nine zeros. It is so much money that if you spent $1,000 a day since the birth of Christ you still would not have spent a billion dollars today. As a matter of fact you could go on for approximately another thousand years. If you spent $20 a day since the dinosaurs vanished, you still would not have spent $500 billion. What I am getting at is that it is a lot of money even by the standards of this government.
How much has the minister saved us? How long has it taken him to save us that money? It was Albert Einstein who once said it is impossible to solve a problem by thinking on the same level that caused it. He was right. If we are going to try to eliminate our deficit and get our budget under control we are going to have to do some bold new thinking.