Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the minister on his speech. It was very enthusiastic. It is obvious that he believes everything is rosy and great and that the items in this budget and all his plans and best wishes are going to create all the wonderful jobs by the expenditure of these moneys that he has outlined so carefully.
However, I would like to remind him that the light he talks about at the end of the tunnel is not a great vision for Canada. The light at the end of the tunnel is the single biggest problem that this government has failed to address, the debt. That debt is going to be over $600 billion. There is no plan by the finance minister or this minister to address how they are going to amortize or mortgage that $600 billion in some reasonable economic way, like a 35 year period, to pay it down.
He brags about the great finance minister who has addressed the deficit. The government is still spending, according to the latest numbers, $19 billion more than it is bringing in. There are some members opposite who would like to start spending more. They think that because the government is ahead of its deficit targets is new found money, a surplus. That is not a surplus.
What I would like to point out is that this minister is complimenting the finance minister and himself for a job half done. I know he will say that nobody is always ever happy and that they want to always get further and better. However, on this job issue, I am getting sick and tired of listening to government try to take credit for creating jobs, to say that their job is to create jobs. Then other members get up, and actually this is a more intelligent response, but it is not the government that creates jobs. It creates the environment and the right conditions and the private sector creates the jobs. But the government has not done its job yet. It has only done half a job. It is still running a deficit.
On the jobs that the government says it has created, I heard this all last week in question period 770,000 new jobs. Then the finance minister claimed that was a net number.
This is the question I would like to ask the minister directly. He should know this because he is in charge of job creation as well. When the Liberals got elected jobs, jobs, jobs was the platform and 1.5 million Canadians were out of work. Their job strategy was infrastructure, a number of these other items that are in the budget and this was going to reduce the unemployment rolls.
Unemployed according to statistics is 1.4 million. If we are talking net numbers it would seem to me, if I do the arithmetic, this government, if it wants to take credit for creating the jobs, created 100,000 new net jobs, not 770,000 new net jobs. Otherwise the unemployment would have been 2.2 million, not 1.5 million.
Somewhere in there the arithmetic is not right. Somewhere in there somebody is spinning a myth that Canadians are getting a bit confused by. I as a member of Parliament do not have this straight. I do not understand how this government can stand up and say it created 770,000 new jobs and it is the private sector that creates the jobs, which is a contradiction right there, and then have an unemployment rate that is only 100,000 lower than what it was.