Mr. Speaker, let me congratulate you on your appointment.
I was not surprised to hear the member from the NDP trying to draw a parallel between us and former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Aside from his actions in tearing up his speech, he failed to draw to our attention that the Brian Mulroney and Conservative era left us with a humongous deficit of $42 billion that we inherited in 1993.
It is nice of them to say that we have to do this and we have to do that, but if we are adding debt and debt we will never be able to implement any of the programs such as the scholarship fund. Unfortunately he was not listening.
He failed to bring forth that just last week one of the local papers in the greater Toronto area stated that employment levels were as high as they were in 1989. They have been rising. They all talk about doom and gloom. They do not want to talk about the good news that has been happening out there. They do not want to talk about the fact that in 1993 unemployment rates were 11.5 percent and today that are at 9 percent and dropping.
We have to point out to the people that spending our way out of this is not the solution. The member is saying “Let's open the purse. Let's spend. It doesn't matter how much debt we will have. Let's just keep adding to it”.