Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Kootenay East for his question.
I am painfully familiar with mortgages. I was not kidding when I said my banker knows I am not obsessed with debt. Having said that, I do not think that in the interests of making a payment on the principal of my mortgage that I would be prepared to feed my family any less or take away from the college trust fund or my life insurance.
The reality is we have to engage in this exercise in a very practical, common sense way. Perhaps it is a regional problem, I am not sure but over and over again we hear particularly from our Reform Party colleagues that we are not moving quickly enough. I can only say as an Atlantic Canadian that to move any quicker would place us exactly in the position we are trying to escape from in terms of generating economic activity in our region. We benefit from social programs. We benefit from transfers.
To respond to earlier analogies with regard to chickens, the fundamental problem with the argument that if we give every province the chickens is that not all chickens are the same size. Consequently, part of what this nation is about is sharing the coop so to speak.