Madam Speaker, I thank the member for those questions. They allow me to clarify both the weakness of the Liberal budget and the soundness of the only alternate budget we have seen that will balance the budget in the short term to offer the security I am talking about in the long term.
What the budget does, to give credit, is signify a change in attitude in government spending. For the first time ever we see a government that has actually seen the light and has turned the corner. It has gone from what is a hopeless situation of increasing deficits to one of modest deficits.
The trouble is-this gets down to the security of the public service-there is no security in offering continued deficit budgets. What possible security is there when someone is loosing their house and not making their mortgage payment?
Why does one see cutbacks in health care transfers from the government? Why does one see cutbacks in welfare transfers? Why does one see cutbacks in training, cutbacks in the military, cutbacks of 45,000 in the public service? One sees it because the government cannot balance the budget. Until it can balance the budget there is no security in any of those programs.
When we brought forward our zero in three plan three years ago we proposed a cutback of 15 per cent in the public service because we were up front and honest. A cutback of 15 per cent would have been a cutback of around 30,000 or 35,000 public servants. We were up front about that.
The government went through the election promising no job losses by the minister of public service renewal. He promised something he could not deliver on. We would have had our program in place. The budget would be within one year of being balanced.
There would have been certainly a job loss of 35,000 public servants but already 45,000 public servants are laid off under the budget. We are not done yet. There will be more contracting out. There will be more private and not for profit agencies. There will be more initiatives by the government in years to come to
make sure public servants pay more than their adequate share of pain for the government's inability to balance the budget.
Come to grips with the fact that the best security one can offer the public service is a balanced budget soon so that there is not the continual whittling away year after year the security the public service deserves.
That is what is happening on that side by failing to address the debt and deficit problem.