Madam Speaker, I was very concerned about the attacks on the Minister of Finance. It is just more of the same from the Reform Party.
As I understand it, the company of the Minister of Finance has 17 out of 21 vessels registered under Canadian ownership. The company pays taxes. The minister made that statement in the House. It is unfortunate that the Reform Party refuses to take that into consideration. The lack of acknowledgement of facts is not peculiar to this issue. It is common in the Reform Party.
The member said that no jobs are being created in the country. It would appear that from the time Reform members were elected in 1993, they stopped reading, they stopped understanding and they stopped looking at Statistics Canada.
We know that over 500,000 new jobs have been created in Canada. Why speaker after speaker gets up and says: "Jobs, jobs, jobs. You never create any jobs" is beyond me. Can I send you some Statistics Canada productions? The last quarter has had a major net increase in job creation as well. This seems to be the rewriting of history which is common in the Reform Party.
He also talked about when the House was down, he was out running around the country and how the rest of the members in this House were doing nothing. I find that an insult, quite frankly. I was conducting town hall meetings and talking about the Canada pension plan with my constituents. We were looking for real solutions to real problems.
He talked about the concerns of people in his riding in paying their mortgages. He could have gone on to say that through the mandate of the government, real interest rates have declined significantly. Those mortgage payments are a lot easier to pay today than they were in 1993.
I would like to mention two items that are of interest to me, credit cards and the RRSP component being 20 per cent foreign mandated and perhaps it should be more than that.
Do members imagine that taxpayers should subsidize people to invest in other countries? I would have thought they would have been arguing the reverse, that we should reduce the 20 per cent foreign component of RRSPs to encourage more investment in Canada and to encourage small and medium business formation. However, not the Reform Party. The Reform Party seems to think it is quite fine to have that investment capital flow outside of our border to be invested in the United States. It would create jobs down there I suppose.
The member mentioned credit cards. One thing that concerns me is the growth of consumer credit in Canada. We know that 93 per cent of disposable income is now paid toward debt repayments for the average individual, which does not include taxes. It is being paid to banks, to financial institutions, et cetera.
Would members of the Reform Party agree that is an alarming level of credit, that we need to curtail credit spending by individu-
als and possibly the extent of credit financing by some of our financial institutions?