Mr. Speaker, the government has played a shell game. There is not a lot of honesty. It is a pretty deceitful thing to brag about.
EI payments have been overcollected. They have taken close to $15 billion and thrown them into general revenues. They have kept their bureaucracy as large as ever. They continue to shuffle money from one portfolio to another. Money moves back and forth under one shell, then under another and back to the other. Basically they have bragged about this and said “Look at the wonderful job we are doing”.
Business knows and the average taxpayer knows that they are not better off today. Balancing the budget had to happen, but let us talk about the $580 billion debt. That debt has not gone away. The servicing of that debt is $42 billion to $43 billion a year. Let us think of what we could have if we were able to deal with that debt effectively. Putting maybe $3 billion a year on that will take forever.
It is like the OECD said. There is no plan. There is nothing here to brag about. Until we get that we will not have a productive country that does not have the figures I talked about.
It is wonderful to get rid of the deficit, but let us talk about the debt. That is the real issue.