It is very true. One opposition party is telling us that the government is going to hell in a hand cart for whatever reason, and the official opposition is taking us to hell in a hand cart with its wish to lead Canada into its form of partition. I find it hard to believe that there are MPs in this House who would advocate the partition of this great country but, sadly, there are.
Although many of us understand where some of them are coming from on policy issues, we have a country to run here and we are not going to survive if we continue to admit, even for debate, this myopic, down the tube, kind of mentality that I have heard around here in the last few weeks.
I have about two minutes to talk about this. The government takes pride-and I am sure the opposition will allow this-in its fiscal record; that is, management of the government's finances. I do not have to go on and on because I am sure my colleagues in government have gone on and on about how well we have done.
What the government has done has been recognized around the world as a stunning success in fiscal management. I hope Canadians will recognize that the next time they get a chance at the polls. We are on course and we are going to stay the fiscal course that the finance minister has set out for us. We have done darn well.
We have excellently placed interest rates. We have a current account either in surplus or capable of generating it. We have solid economic growth.
I just received a sheet of economic indicators. It is a forecast from the policy and economics analysis branch of the program at the University of Toronto. There are two items that must be mentioned. The first item is fiscal and the other item is macro-economic.
The macro-economic note worth reading is that the country turned the corner on the debt to GDP ratio between the second and third quarter of 1996. It has dropped from a peak of 55.5 per cent and is now headed downward into the lower 50s and will be into the upper 40s fairly soon.
The other note is fiscal. On a national account basis, the government will have no borrowing needs by the third quarter of 1998, roughly a year from now. Canadians can take pride in this.
Having noted those two major items on the economic front I will close my remarks.