Mr. Chairman, I hope the people of Canada will begin to realize that all of those painful spending cuts were used up to pay more interest.
Was the higher interest on the debt which was inherited or was it on the debt which was created by delaying the spending cuts? That is what I was driving at.
The Liberals inherited a certain debt which had a certain cost. However, that cost has risen by $14 billion. Why did it increase by $14 billion? It increased because the government added to the debt when it simply slowed down the rate at which it cut its expenditures.
I can understand all the political rhetoric about setting targets and so on, but what this minister has just admitted is that $14 billion increase in interest he had to pay by taking it out of the hides of Canadians is due to not having quicker targets. That is the criticism the Reform Party has made of the approach of having targets that are too low. If the same cuts had been made more quickly all those cuts would now have produced a balanced budget.