Mr. Speaker, it was interesting. What the member was doing was quoting from the Liberal finance department's briefing notes. This is what the hon. member should say in response to Reformers. Use this quote, this quote and this quote, and see what happens.
I am not sure of the economic credentials of some of the people who wrote some of those articles. I am sure they are all excellent journalists in one form or the other. A lot of what the member said is true. The finance minister has hit his target.
Actually, Mr. Speaker, if you put a string a foot above the foyer I could jump over it without any problem. If you put the target up where it should be, where I would be competitive, in my case it still would not be too high because of the shape I am in. Let us say three or four feet and then it would be a challenge.
The finance minister has set his sights very low. He is certainly hitting his targets but he is doing it at great cost to future generations. Low income seniors will not have their old age pensions and CPP because of the finance minister's low targets. Young people today, our kids and our grand kids will be paying taxes that they cannot afford to pay and they will be looking for jobs that are not available because the finance minister set his targets far too low.
Mr. Simpson said that this should have been done sooner. It certainly should have been done a whole lot sooner. The debt was $17 billion in our centennial year. Now the deficit is $30 or $40 billion a year.
One of the worst finance ministers during that period is the current Prime Minister. He started us down the wrong road. The Mulroney government came along and it could not fix it either. Canadians finally started getting mad and now they are electing Reformers because they realize they were headed on a course to disaster if we do not get the federal ledger balanced and get it done soon.
As far as Mr. Moscovitz is concerned he is a great reporter. I enjoy watching his show. He is always entertaining but he reminds me in that statement of a lot of reporters who said in 1988 that the Reform will never elect an MP. These are the people who said that. "They will never elect an MP. You will never see one of them sitting in the House of Commons". In 1989 we elected our first MP.
They said that Reform would never get anywhere outside of western Canada and it will never be anything more than just a rump in the west. We hold the majority of seats in western Canada and we elected a member in Ontario. We were the second strongest party in Ontario.
The other day we almost won a seat in Newfoundland where the experts had written us off and said we would never even get a toehold.
Mr. Moscovitz may be wrong. We see the Liberals breaking their promises, taking away OAS, not being able to fund CPP, not being able to support post-secondary education. Then Canadians will say the Liberals betrayed us, the Reformers were right and that is where we had better put our stocks in the future.