Madam Speaker, I reject very much the hon. member's premise which is that the social safety net is somehow the fabric of this nation, as though people in this country cannot somehow create their own tremendous culture by virtue of their own dreams and aspirations and in what they contribute to the country.
Having said that, I would be happy to answer the hon. member's question. He has asked where we would cut and we laid it out explicitly, unlike the government. During the election campaign government members said not to worry about social programs, they were not going to touch them. A year later, of course, they did a tremendous flip-flop. The hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce announced that the government has flip-flopped on its red book promises. There is still $20 billion that the government will have to cut to get its deficit to zero, at
least $20 billion by its own projections, and it has not laid out how it expects to get there.
Is the government telling people everything? Is it really not going to cut any more social programs, like it says, or is it going to get to zero like it tells people? It cannot be both ways.
We have been very up front with people. We said we would cut $15 billion. We would cut $3 billion out of old age security. It will go from $20 billion to $17 billion. We would make big cuts to transfers for welfare. We have said that. We are not embarrassed at all to say that. We know that we have to do that so that ultimately we will not allow social programs to completely unravel. We have to make those cuts.
I would like to emphasize again that for the hon. member to say somehow Canada is a social safety net is ridiculous. People who work every day for a living look at that. People who contribute to the economy and make great contributions to the culture of this nation look at that and say if that is the best we can do to become a country, produce some bloated government bureaucracy to come up with a bunch of social programs, that is not a country at all. That is a social welfare state. The hon. member across the way does not understand the country at all.