Mr. Speaker, the Canadian people are entitled to have the Canadian Alliance members put some consistency into what they are saying. The Leader of the Opposition stood and said that what we should have done was pay down debt. Now the opposition critic has stood and has said what we should have done was pay down taxes. They cannot have it both ways.
The fundamental fact is that over the course of the last eight months the Canadian Alliance has asked for $36 billion in additional spending. If we had done that, we would be in a double digit deficit. There would be no tax cuts and there would be no debt reduction.