Mr. Speaker, since we formed the government three years and a few months ago, our main preoccupation has been jobs. We knew when we formed the government that we had a deficit of $42 billion. We knew that the entire international financial community had lost faith in Canada. Some were comparing Canada to a third world situation. Today everybody says that we will do better than any other G-7 nation in 1997-98.
We were also the government that was not afraid to tackle the problem of the deficit and really do something about it. When a government does that, it has to stay the course. We are not about to try and buy the votes of the Canadian people the way the leader of the Reform Party is trying to do with tax cuts before we have reduced the deficit to zero. This is the only responsible way.