Mr. Speaker, it was a pleasure to listen to the speech by the hon. member who is a dairy farmer. You get some good home farm advice. But I wonder whether the Liberal members are redundant. Except for their trained seal capacity to vote as told they have all been spewing the same bland stuff that was in that throne speech, and there is nothing there.
I especially take great exception to the fact that almost every one of them has said, as we heard during the election campaign, “we have our fiscal house in order”. We keep hearing that. I do not know how to say this diplomatically or in a parliamentary way but it ain't true. We do not have our fiscal house in order.
The debt has been increasing. I am a teacher and I would love to have an overhead projector here. If we look at the size of the debt, instead of going up one way on a graph as it did from the previous government, it has now gone another way. The Liberals take credit for this wee little turn in the graph.
The fact is under this government the debt still went up from $500 billion to $600 billion. Instead of paying $40 billion a year in interest we are now paying $47 billion a year in interest. They keep on repeating this and it has worked. A lot of people in Canada think it is true that our fiscal house is in order.
I want to give them a mild applause for at least making that little turn, but it is not good enough. I would like to ask this member to respond specifically to my question. How can he keep saying we are all okay when in fact they have been responsible for adding yet another 20 percent, another $100 billion, to the debt during their previous term?