Madam Speaker, the hon. member has some very important and interesting questions.
The first one I am not able to answer. He asked me how many tax increases have we had in personal income taxes. I am not able to answer that question because there have not been any. There have been none, so I cannot give him an example. I cannot give him even one example over the past three years.
The hon. member asked me about deficit reduction and lower interest rates which have been brought about. When this government came into power we were faced with a $44 billion deficit, a deficit that was absolutely shocking in size. We thought it was
going to be $34 billion. The promise in our red book was to bring that deficit down to $25 billion or 3 per cent of GDP. However, bringing it down from $44 billion to $25 billion is a lot different problem from bringing it down from $55 billion to $34 billion. We faced up to that problem. We said we were going to do that and we did it.
Our program has not been a single purpose one. It has not been about setting a target. The previous government set many targets every year and did not meet any of them. Our program has not just been to set targets but to meet targets. I would suggest that the Reform Party has never met a target in its existence. We have not only set targets, we have met those targets.
The result has been a massive increase in the credibility of the Canadian government. We are now the darlings of the international financial community. We were much less than that three years ago. We have lowered interest rates in this country so that the bank's prime rate is 3.5 percentage points below the U.S. prime rate. I cannot remember in all my years, and that goes back a long time, since we have had interest rates as low as they are now.
I can tell the hon. members across the way who seem to keep chattering away while I am talking that lower interest rates are a real boon for Canadians. Lower interest rates lead to lower mortgage costs and lower credit costs for Canadians. This makes jobs. It enables industries to bring new plants into being which creates jobs for Canadians. The results are clear and they will be coming as we progress in this economic recovery with our low interest rates. We are already seeing those results in the increase in the number of jobs this country is producing now and it will be seen even more so in the future.