Mr. Speaker, I compliment the minister on his speech. I want to make a couple of comments and then ask him a question.
First, I think he misuses the Titanic analogy. It is the government that is on the Titanic and the iceberg out there is the national debt. If you hit that, you are going to tear a hole in the government, you are going to tear a hole in every social program funded by this country.
Second, I was amused by his quoting Disraeli. He of course is free to quote whoever he likes. The minister realizes, of course, that Disraeli spent his entire life attacking and trying to destroy the British Liberal party under William Gladstone.
The minister also implied that Reform does not support federal spending. I encourage him to read and study what was actually said. We are prepared to support a spending program of $103 billion in 1998. That is exactly the same spending program in aggregate terms that the government is proposing. What we are saying is we should freeze that for three years and give greater attention to this debt and tax problem which we say is looming larger.
The third comment before I get to my question is the minister talked about flexibility and the desire to protect the Canadian dollar against instability such as is registered in the Asian financial flu. Surely the minister knows from his own background that the speculators that take a run at the Canadian dollar, or anybody else, look at your fundamentals. They take a run at you when your fundamentals are not right. It is true one of the fundamentals they look at is whether your budget is balanced, but the other fundamental they look at is your high debt levels.
Surely the minister recognizes that we are carrying a lot of our debt on short term money. A one and a half per cent increase in interest rates would add about $8 billion to interest charges in two years and blow the minister's projections for a balanced budget out the window. Getting the debt down is one of the best protections you have against Asian financial flu.
That brings me to my question. I know the minister will like this because he has sometimes indicated in question period where his heart is. He has admitted to the House that our tax levels are excessively high. He must know that high taxes kill jobs and low taxes help create jobs.
He knows our tax rates are higher than the US and that our unemployment rate is four points higher than the US. He knows that tinkering with taxes is not going to provide the tax relief required to stimulate real job creation.
Why in the name of jobs, why in the name of common sense, does the minister not become a champion of bold, vigorous, major, substantive tax relief within the Liberal cabinet?