Madam Speaker, the next issue is the one that my chirpy friend is talking about and that is the debt.
There is no doubt that the Liberals are going to deal with the debt. We have a strategy to deal with it because it is a major issue. We cannot deal with the debt until we deal with the deficit, get our fiscal house in order and clean up the mess of the Mulroney years.
When I sat in opposition there were 42 cabinet ministers over here. They took up two and a half rows of seats. They all had their fancy limos. They all ran around creating programs. We have come in with a very streamlined and clean government which is working toward improving the economy. I want to prove that we have.
So far I have explained to everyone in the House and across Canada that we have met our commitments in moving toward a balanced budget. We have worked very hard at that. We have had to make tough choices.
If the party across the way were to be different than the Tory party of old, it would admit that the government has done a very good job as it relates to that issue, even though it has been tough. None of us on this side are happy when programs are cut because we are Liberals. Liberals like to give service to the Canadian people. Liberals do not rejoice when somebody is cut off. We do not rejoice when a program is cut because it hurts people.
Therefore we do not spend our time running around the country saying: "Man, are we ever doing a good job cutting the deficit," because it hurts. We just carry on with other areas by focusing on issues that we think are important.
I want to talk about the government's record on jobs. The member talked about that at the end of his speech. I do not want to talk about it very long. It is a pretty darn good record. Quite frankly anybody should be proud of it. The question Canadians should ask is: "Are we better off than we were before? Are we better off now with this government than we were under the old government? Are the directions, the policies and the programs of this government proving to be successful in going where we want to go?"
There are key indicators that should show that. One of course is interest rates. They are at the lowest in 30 years. The inflation rate is at the lowest in 30 years. The bond raters and even the Globe and Mail said that the government has really got its act together and is going in the right direction. That is two areas.
The other area is job creation. Nobody in this Chamber will say that Liberals are happy with the unemployment rate because they are not. If we had our way we would like to see the unemployment rate down to the lowest level that it has ever been in history or at least lower than it has ever been in my lifetime and that is under5 per cent. We have a long way to go because the rate is still over9 per cent.
I want to lay these facts on the table. Perhaps the Reform's research is not very good. If the Reform members would ask us we would send the facts over to them.
Reformers continue to pretend that something is not working in the government as it relates to jobs and strategy but the numbers do not prove that. Six hundred and thirty-six thousand more Canadians have jobs than when we took office. That is not bad. The average gain in 1996 has been roughly 30,000 more jobs every month since December. Full time jobs were up 47,000 in April. That is the fifth month in a row there has been growth in jobs. Most of the increase in that month was in the manufacturing sector with 37,000 very good, high quality jobs.
Another issue which I find very cynical about the Reform members, as sanctimonious as they can get, is that they pretend there is some sort of conspiracy over here. They just want to be very selective in their facts.
Let me give the reason the unemployment rate has not gone down as fast as it should even though jobs have been created. The labour force was up 54,000 in April and up 137,000 since October 1995. What does that mean? It means people who had quit looking for work over a number of years are now beginning to look for work and are finding work. The labour force is getting bigger which changes the numbers and makes it look in some cases as if the unemployment rate is not going down as fast as it should. The reason is that people are now getting so much a sense that the government is going in the right direction that there is hope and they are now looking for work more than they ever have before.
Another statistic comes from the private sector. This is another indication of how well the government's policies are working. Twenty-three per cent of employers told Manpower Temporary Services, which is a private sector group that does monitoring of this, that they expected to increase staffing in the third quarter of 1996. This survey found that 23 per cent of employers expected that they would be hiring more employees.
In northern Ontario, 40 per cent of the employers in the Sudbury area expect to hire more people in this next quarter. Thirty-three per cent of the employers in the Thunder Bay area, which is close to where I am from, said they expected to hire more individuals because of the faith they have in the economy and because of the policies of this government. This comes from a private sector
group which knows that growth is coming and that we have our fiscal house in order and the benefits are beginning to show.
In the last budget we focused on certain areas. I could spend another hour talking about the nonsense motion of the Reform Party simply because it shows just how desperate Reformers have become. I know how frustrating it can be to be at the same level in the polls as the Conservatives were two and one-half years ago during the 1993 election. They were hovering around 12 per cent. Those were the good days. That is about where the Reformers have been hovering around. Sometimes they jump to 16 per cent, the odd time when somebody says the right thing. I can understand why they would get very depressed and why they would have a nonsense motion like this one.
Let us remember that in the last budget we said that because we could not raise taxes, which we recognized, and because we knew we had to deal with the deficit and debt, we would have to repriorize some of our spending. We focused on three areas: youth, technology and trade. A multitude of things are going on with respect to youth, which I wish I had some time to talk about but I do not. There is also technology and trade, the Team Canada approach and the $20 billion worth of trade and exports we have been able to help employers with because of the priority we put on international trade. Those are the kinds of things Canadians expect us to do.
In closing, I will tell the opposition members about this government's very good record and the integrity it has brought back to this place. I can understand how difficult it can be for right wingers to understand what integrity is. They had to live through the Brian Mulroney government and all of the scandals that I lived through between 1984-88 and 1988-93 when some 20-odd ministers had to pack their bags and wonder off. Of course they voted for those folks.
Let me give Reformers one bit of advice. If they are going to be successful as a party they are going to have to do it based on facts, not on fiction and not on trying to scare Canadians that this party is doing a bad job. Talking to my constituents and the polls prove to me every day that we are doing the right thing. We are improving people's plight every day and we are working very hard at it. We are not doing it overnight but we are making a difference.