Mr. Speaker, I will be quite delicate, because as I said earlier today, my role here is to take notes and listen, not to enter into substantive debate. Nor will I respond to a couple of personal barbs.
Just purely on the question of facts, my difficulty with the finance critic is that he is on many occasions somewhat loose with the facts. I would like to just mention one. This is the notion that under the Liberal government we are back to tax and spend big government.
The fact of the matter is that the proper way to measure the size of the government is to take total federal program spending, that is spending on everything except interest payments, as a percentage of the size of the economy. That is, how big a slice of our total national pie do federal programs take. The fact of the matter is that we are lower today in terms of that slice of the pie than at any time in my lifetime. We have to go back more than 50 years before we find a federal government smaller than it is today.
My colleagues in the NDP will lament this fact. They would prefer to see a larger government. However, I am not talking about what is good or what is bad. I am only talking about facts.
How in the world can this member of parliament talk about us having a big government when in fact we have been shrinking to the point where today we are smaller, as a percentage of GDP, than we have been in the last 50 years?