Madam Speaker, this reminds me of a number of occasions in my professional career when I was asked to help explain math and finance to lawyers. It would not be the first time in my life that I have done that.
We are talking about three different things here. There is the rate of reduction in expenditures per year. For the Reform Party budget we were talking of a total reduction in costs or in government overspending, in other words a reduction of government expenditures over a three year period. Just as the Liberals projected, so did we project a-and I hesitate to use the word-conservative growth rate in the economy.
Our plan did in fact work over a three year period. It does not work if we compare the three year number with the one year number which we are talking about when we deal with the budget every year here. The member and I will have to get together afterward to look at the actual numbers.
The fact is when we did that budget originally when we did our planning during the campaign, the assumptions then were that the deficit was around $35 billion. It only came in over $40 billion after the accounting was in from the previous government. Obviously in our budget plan last year we took the new figure which I think was around $37 billion. If we take that number away, add the amount of economic growth, in fact in three years we did have a plan for a balanced budget. There is just no other way of saying it. I do not know how to explain it without the use of an overhead projector which I am accustomed to using.