Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand to speak to this motion.
I first want to say that the remarks I am about to make should not be construed as being remarks that are negative toward the hon. member who is pursuing the position of deputy chairman. As everyone knows, the hon. member has done a good job in the House in terms of being able to understand the rules and certainly he is up on the rules. Nobody would quarrel with that.
I think the quarrel that the people in the Reform Party have and anybody who has read the red book has is that this is completely contrary to what the government promised it would do. The great irony is that the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands who is pursuing the position is the one who wrote the policy for the red book. There is a great inconsistency here.
We do not need to hammer too much on that broken promise. I think it has been done fairly sufficiently this evening. It is pretty obvious for anybody who wants to have a good look at it. The fact is the hon. member himself wrote the red book promise and is breaking it himself. People can judge for themselves whether that is integrity. I would say it is not.
I want to follow up on some of the comments I have heard tonight and perhaps talk a little bit about the two fundamental visions we are hearing about in the House. One of course is the Liberal-Tory vision and the other is our vision.
Before I do that I feel compelled to follow up on the smear campaign that we are hearing. Certainly the member for Carleton-Gloucester was going on calling us all kinds of names. That is fine. I do not think that carries much weight with ordinary Canadians.
I do want to make reference to his point where he said that he thought the Bloc Quebecois members were very rational thinkers. He seemed to agree with them a lot. He is certainly entitled to his opinion, but I am surprised at his comments. I would be surprised if the people in Carleton-Gloucester really agreed with him. We are talking about the people who are proposing to break up the country. The hon. member for Carleton-Gloucester seems to be supporting them. That is quite shocking. In a sense, when we consider how close the government came to losing the last referendum campaign, within 50,000 votes, perhaps it is not so surprising after all.
I do want to talk for a moment about the two fundamental differences which really relate to this whole issue. This whole issue is a microcosm of the two fundamental differences in visions of the country between the Liberal-Tory regime and the Reform Party regime. The best way to explain the differences is to look at the history.
An hon. member back here is continuing the smear campaign that was started earlier in the day. Hopefully they will find out that it is futile.
Let us look at the record. With the Liberals and Tories in power, going back to the early seventies the debt has gone from about $13 billion to about $600 billion. I will do for my Liberal friends across the way what I often do for high school students. I will point out to them how much money that is. If I had a stack of hundred dollar bills about two metres high, that would be a million dollars. If we stacked our debt in one hundred dollar bills, it would be 1,200 kilometres high. That is an astounding amount of money.
Only a few weeks ago the finance minister made a presentation to the finance committee. It was a sort of state of the nation address with respect to the economy. I was quite surprised when, knowing that we had this huge debt problem, the finance minister came in and announced that the deficit for last year was only $28.6 billion. Only $28.6 billion. And what happened? The Liberal members began to clap. They said: "Is that not wonderful. It is only $28.6 billion".
As my leader pointed out, only in the never never land of Ottawa would $28.6 billion in the hole be applauded. There they were lined up like crows on a telephone wire applauding away as if this were some great accomplishment. However, I can assure the people across the way that back home in the real world there was no applauding because the people back home know the only place that money comes from to pay for these deficits is out of the pockets of ordinary Canadians.
I think this is a fundamental difference between the Liberal-Tory vision and the Reform vision. The Liberals and the Tories have for years and years piled up the debt, ran up taxes. Hon. members across the way have probably heard over the last few days, because we have mentioned it once or twice, that in the three years they have been in power the average Canadian family has seen its purchasing power go down by $3,000 per family per year; a national pay cut courtesy of the Liberal government.
The Liberal member across the way is laughing. But I can say that the people who do not have incomes of $64,300 plus all the expense money that MPs have are not laughing because they have to pay for that out of their savings.