Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure on behalf of the Reform Party of rising to speak to the budget. In doing so I will try to keep my remarks brief and to the point.
In the 1993 election the Reform Party ran on a proposal to cut the deficit in order to create jobs and to cut nearly $20 billion in government spending over a period of three years. The Liberal Party ran on a program to create jobs by ignoring the deficit.
Let us look at what we actually have from the government after three years. I draw the attention of any Canadian who is interested to the budget speech. Skip through the first 27 or 28 pages, which is all bafflegab. One thing we notice about this minister is that the less he has to say, the longer his budget speeches.
There were fewer proposals in this one than in the last two but it must have been the longest budget speech in history. When you get to the end, look at the four pages at the back because they provide a statistical summary of the budget that has most if not all of the relevant information for most Canadian taxpayers.
From 1993 to 1998 the deficit is projected to fall from $42 billion to $17 billion, a drop of $25 billion. How is that achieved? Revenue will rise in the same period by $25 billion. This is the government saying it has no tax increases but revenue is rising as a percentage of the economy.
However, if we have a $25 billion revenue increase and a fall in the deficit of $25 billion, why do we have any spending cuts at all from the government? Why do we not have a balanced budget?
We have an increase in interest payments of at least $11 billion. I say at least because most of that has already been achieved and it will continue to rise. One of the ways the government makes the deficit look like it is to continue to fall is by insisting that interest payments will taper off, that we will have lower and lower interest rates, but that is the best case scenario.
Interest payments have already risen $11 billion, and so the government has been cutting over this period. By the end of 1998 it will be cutting $23 billion in programs and will still have a deficit of $17 billion. That is an interesting figure, $23 billion, because that is more than the Reform Party had proposed to cut in the 1993 election. It is because the $100 billion in debt the government is adding, it is the cost of its delay and the cost of fiscal mismanagement. By the way, the debt at this moment and in the next year at least and probably the year after will continue to grow faster than the economy.
Now the Liberals tell us they have targets. The targets are outlined in the budget. We just had a deficit of $32 billion. It will be $24.3 billion next year and the year after it will be $17.7 billion. This all sounded very familiar, so I asked one of my researchers to get me the 1991 Tory budget presented three years into the Conservatives' last term of office. Guess what the 1991 Tory budget stated. The deficit that year was $30.5 billion; for the fiscal year beginning in 1992, the projection was $24 billion; in 1993 it was $16.6 billion. It all sounds familiar.