Now that I have the attention of my hon. friends, perhaps they can listen to this lecture. I am quoting again from the red book:
Given the current state of the economy, a realistic interim target for a Liberal government is to seek to reduce the federal deficit to 3 per cent of gross domestic product by the end of its third year in office.
That is the goal we set ourselves. We said this is what we would do. Let us put that into some kind of a context. Let us put that into the context of my home.
Let us say that I am running a debt and I am running a deficit with my credit cards. I can say to my family: "Look. We owe a few thousand dollars. We are going to have to cut back a little bit so you will not be able to take all of the lessons you want to take. I will not be able to go out as often as I want. Even though I might like to go to the concert, I will not be able to pay $100 for a Julio Iglesias ticket because we cannot afford it. Yes, we will be able to go to something else. Maybe we will be able to go to a free concert offered by somebody on July 1". I will cut back here and there. I will still buy groceries of course. I will still buy clothing. I will still put gas in the car. I will still have a car that I can drive so I can take the children to and from their various activities. I will still do those things but I will cut back.
What will this mean? Yes it will be a little tough but over a period of time, over two or three years, we will pay off that $2,000 or $3,000. Once we have that $2,000 or $3,000 paid off then I will be able to handle the debt load.
That is one approach and it is the approach I think the Liberal Party is taking. It is the reasoned responsible approach to reducing the deficit.
There are others who might approach their family and say: "Listen. We are $2,000 in debt so we are not going to buy any groceries this week. We are not going to go anywhere. We are not going to go to any lessons. We are going to get rid of the car, we are going to get rid of the house, we are going to get rid of everything. By golly we are going to pay that $2,000 back". I am not going to have a family left if I take that approach.
That is not the Liberal approach. The Liberal approach is a reasoned, carefully considered slow approach to deficit reduction, to running a deficit of zero. Once we get to zero then we get to positive numbers and we can start paying off some of that debt, remembering that not all debt is bad. Otherwise we cannot have some of the things that all of us have taken for granted.
What target did the Liberals set? We set ourselves a realistic target for three years. Guess what? We are going to meet that target. Not only are we going to meet that target, we are going to drop from over $40 billion to about $17 billion in 1997-98.
Compare that to the bombast and the sad predictions made by the Conservative government over a period of nine years. That government also came into office promising that it would get rid of the horrendous debt which the Liberals had run up in the profligacy of their time. They had run up a debt. There is no question. Over the whole course of Confederation from 1867 until 1984, a debt of approximately $250 billion had been run up. Remember, it took our entire history to get to that point and in nine years the Conservative government doubled it. That was from a government which promised to reduce the debt.
What have we done? We have kept our promises. We have reduced the deficit from the $42.5 billion when we took office and we will keep our promise by bringing it down to $17 billion. What does that mean? It means it is decreasing. In the next mandate we will still be decreasing the deficit and we will reach zero on a rolling target basis, as our finance minister says.
The proof is in the pudding. The deficit has decreased. Hon. members opposite can heckle all they want but the deficit is decreasing. That is a fact and they cannot argue with fact. They can be rhetorical, they can make all kinds of comments, but one thing is certain: the deficit is going down. It is going down under a Liberal government. It was going up under the previous Conservative government. It will continue to go down under this government. That is the key promise of this budget. It is one of the reasons I support it.
Now I will turn to the GST. What did the red book that everybody professes to have read say? It is interesting. It is right in there.
I remember when I was campaigning. My campaign office was open to everyone. There were copies of the red book. There were copies of summaries of the red book. I had campaign literature which I distributed to the people in the riding. In fact, I told the people in the riding what we were going to do before the election was called. Nobody in Scarborough West can say they did not know what our promise was. What was our promise? It is on page 22:
In the first session of a new Parliament, a Liberal government will give the all-party Finance Committee of the House of Commons a 12-month mandate to consult fully with Canadians and provincial governments and to report on ways to achieve tax fairness, simplicity, and harmonization.
Did I see the word harmonization? There it is, right in the red book.
Did we deliver on that? Yes, we did. That is exactly what the House of Commons committee did. It continued: "In particular the committee will be mandated to report on all options for alternatives to the current GST", and it did. It continued: "A Liberal government will replace the GST"-there is the word replace-"with a system that generates equivalent revenues, is fairer to consumers and to small business, minimizes disruption to small business, and promotes federal-provincial fiscal co-operation and harmonization". There is the word again, twice in the same paragraph, in advance of anybody casting a vote.
In 1993 prior to the election, I issued a communique to the people of my riding. It was four pages long and it talked about the goods and services tax, what was wrong with it and why there were problems with it. Among other things this is what I said: "If we are given the privilege of governing, a Liberal government will, as a first priority, mandate an all-party Commons finance committee to consult Canadians and various levels of government on options to the current GST. Our objective will be to replace the GST with a system that, while generating the same revenues, will be fairer to consumers, easier to administer and will promote federal-provincial co-operation rather than tax competition".
That sounds very similar to what is in the red book, but it was issued before the red book. Why? Because it had been widely discussed and it was known when we were criticizing the Conservative government that this was going to be our approach. So even if somebody says that they did not see the red book, if they had been following the debate since the introduction of the GST, they would know that this was not some rabbit being plucked out of a hat, it was a longstanding policy of the Liberal Party. I say longstanding in the context of when the GST was brought in.
I want to talk a bit about the history of the GST because it is important to recognize the context. The Conservative government brought in the GST as a replacement for the manufacturers sales tax. It was not supposed to get the government more money. It was supposed to be revenue neutral. This was the big promise.
When the government found out it was going to collect billions upon billions of dollars more than expected, it decided to come up with the GST rebate. That is why people get cheques today for the GST. That is why they apply for GST credits on their tax returns. It is because the tax takes in more money than was expected when it replaced the manufacturers sales tax. People forget that because
now they get their nice GST rebate cheques and they want to continue receiving them.
The point of the tax was not to pay down the deficit and the debt. The point of the tax was to collect the same amount as the manufacturers sales tax but in a fairer and more open way because the manufacturers sales tax was a hidden tax. That was the whole point of the GST and it failed miserably. That was one reason we opposed it. It was not going to do the job and it was going to cost too much to administer.
That is why we are continuing to do what we can to meet our promise. We have until the end of our mandate to meet the promise. We on this side of the House are going to do the best we can to meet that promise. We have done that with the rest of the promises we set forth in the red book. I do not want people to forget the historical context of that.
Finally, I want to talk about the credibility of the finance minister. In my view, his credibility is impeccable. I was in the last Parliament and those who were here will remember that year after year Michael Wilson stood and delivered his budget address and made predictions. Year after year we could bet the mortgages on our homes that his predictions would fail, and they did.
When he moved over to international trade and Don Mazankowski became finance minister, he made predictions that failed. The finance minister was never right. For the opposition it was like shooting fish in a barrel. All the finance minister had to do was predict something would happen and we knew right away it would not happen based on his track record. We had ample time to set up our artillery and take our shots at him. It was not even a challenge for us.
We now have a finance minister who has laid out certain goals and has met them. He did not go off on some tangent and promise the undeliverable. He has said: "Here is what we are going to do in the first two years. Here is what we will do in the next two years". And guess what? He did it. Who can argue with that? It is almost inconceivable.
One can see the frustration of the opposition parties. How can they argue with success? How can they argue with a finance minister who says he will do something and then he does it? They cannot argue with that. But oh, no. The opposition parties have to say that he did not promise enough and that they wanted more promises.
Well, our finance minister is a man of cool head and reflection. He knows how to bring the deficit down to zero. The way to do that is by rolling targets, exactly as he has said.
In my view there is no question of the credibility of the finance minister, of his judgment, of his commitment to the principles in the red book. There is no question at all we will meet the commitments we made. There is no question at all that the government and the people on this side will keep their promises.
That is why today at 6.30 p.m. I will be voting in favour of the budget.