Madam Speaker, I can help the government by the very method I am using here today.
It is not what we promise but what we say. I am only criticizing the red book. We and other people took a look at the red book. There were 187 promises made in the red book. I have said the government has kept 46 of them. There is the compliment. It has 121 to go and only one year left before an election. It had better crank it up.
How we in opposition help the government is to hold the government accountable to those policies and principles it uses to get elected. The Liberals promised to protect the civil service. They fired 44,000. They promised stable funding for the CBC. When we came out with our first budget and said we would cut spending on the CBC by $330 million guess what? The Liberals broke that promise. They called us slash and burn and draconian for recommending that. They slashed the CBC to the tune of $337 million, $7 million more than what we said. Where is the slash and burn now? Where is the draconian budget cutting now?
Our job is to to exactly what we are doing, holding the government side accountable, questioning integrity and showing incompetence if there is any because taxpayers have invested in 295 people to look after their interests. The government can brag about what it has done and done right. I wish it would not distort the truth, though.
I wish the minister of myth would use reality rather than fiction. I have to point out what he is doing wrong. That is wrong. It is wrong to talk to Canadians that way. What is right is to talk about the whole picture. A true financial picture has assets and liabilities. People have to talk about their liabilities and not only their assets. Although he has done well on the deficit, what the government should be doing is targeting the debt as a percentage of GDP.
On a federal basis currently that is running at 76 per cent. Our debt at close to $600 billion is 76 per cent of our GDP. If the provincial debts are combined with that, we are at a trillion dollars. We are at 104 per cent debt to GDP. That is very high and the credit rating goes to risk.
Control over finances is not in our hands when 40 per cent of that debt is outside the country. My contribution to the government is to make it aware of the facts, remind it of the facts and hope it addresses the facts. That is how I help.
The government, the finance minister and the Prime Minister have the power to act. We do not. There are so many things the government is missing that it may sound like a diatribe on poor
government, but for me to talk about all the good ideas that we have would take another week.