Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague talked about job creation. He said that jobs are created every day. He said that 500,000 jobs have been created since his government came into office. However, how many jobs have been lost during the same time?
Of course, we are all morally responsible. Those who should bear the most responsibility are those who have created the deficit, the debt. When Mr. Trudeau came into office in 1970, he began to get the country deep into debt. And this went on. When the Conservatives came to power, they did not do any better.
It is true that we have a responsibility, and I think that everybody here has benefited from that in some way. Some a lot, some less. However, those who benefited the least are the poor, and more particularly maybe the people living in rural areas like mine and in isolated areas. Now, today, we are asked to show restraint, to tighten our belts, and very often those who have benefited the most are asking those who have benefited the least to suffer the consequences. That is unfair.
Yes, I recognize that we all have some responsibility. Yes, I recognize that I myself have benefited somewhat from it. But at least let us not ask those who hardly benefited at all from it to tighten their belts even more today.
Someone said earlier that we have to find money somewhere. The question is where do we look for that money. We proposed and we are still asking that we look for it in the family trusts and the banks, because they definitely benefited a lot from it. Therefore, they should at least pay a fair share of the bill. I have here a long list of duplications that everybody can see. The Minister of Finance has seen it himself.
I will repeat just part of what he said. Just about every small business has had a federal tax auditor drop in, followed by a federal sales tax auditor, a provincial corporate tax auditor, and a provincial retail sales tax auditor. All these people wanted to get the same figures. And they all came at about the same time and on the same day.
The government has just realized that, but we have been pointing out this problem for years. I could give many more examples of duplication, but my question for my colleague is this: Instead of targeting those who did not gain any advantage from this collective debt build-up, should we not be going after those who did mightily, and have them foot part of the bill?