Mr. Speaker, at the outset I would like to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca, one of the great ridings in western Canada.
I really hesitate to stand after the flamboyant member who just spoke. I do not have the dress for it. She had a really good seasonal costume and I am dressed so plainly I feel embarrassed standing up after her. However, we will deal with it the best that we can.
I would also like to say that I was shocked to hear the parliamentary secretary for finance say that he was surprised that we would use this supply day for this motion. I need to chide him. That is what supply is about. Supply is the granting of money from the taxpayers of the country to the government so that it can carry on with the business of the country. When we have supply days it really has to do with issues that are meant to hold the government accountable, particularly in the area of supply. For him to be shocked at this is rather surprising.
I was thinking about what to say this morning and I recall that a number of years ago one of my friends told me that I should buy some shares in a company, which I will not name here. He told me I needed to buy those shares. They were only $6.50 and he told me to mortgage my house as they could only go up. About a month later I saw him again and told him I was glad I did not take his advice because the shares were down to $6.20. His response was surprising. He said that if they were a good buy at $6.50, then I should be tripping over myself running down to buy them at $6.20 because then they were really a good buy.
I declined his advice because I did not like the direction in which those shares were going. He said it was an anomaly, that it would turn around and I could be rich if I bought $50,000 or $60,000 worth of shares in that company. I never had any kind of money anywhere near that, but hat is how he spoke. A year later those shares were selling at $18. I guess I missed a glorious opportunity because I did not take advice from a guy who probably knew a little more about it than I did.
Part of my speech today will be a bit of a chastisement to the government for a wasted opportunity. In fact I would call it a squandered opportunity over the last eight years. The Liberals took over when the country and in fact the world were rebounding from serious economic problems. They took over from some changes such as free trade that had been brought into place, which really helped them immensely despite the fact that when they were on the opposition side in the House they railed against free trade.
All members in the House know that our trade with our trading partners has a major positive impact on our present well-being in the country, but the Liberals were against it. Now of course every once in a while the finance minister stands up on this, and I am sure we will hear a great deal of gloating when he presents his budget speech a week from yesterday. It will be about how wonderful the government is, how it did all this stuff. I dread saying this, but I believe that it happened primarily despite the fact that the Liberals were in charge. These things happened and I think we could have done so much better. That is where the squandered opportunity comes in.
I want to focus on one of the parts of the motion today and that is the issue of debt. The government wastes money and has increased its spending way beyond its expectations. It is just not right to have done that. During those years of surpluses that we have had in the last four or five years, I sincerely wish that the government would have utilized more of those unexpected resources to pay down the debt.
There is no better time to reduce indebtedness than when one is in a good fiscal situation. That is when we should reduce the debt. We had that opportunity and the government squandered it. For the record, I am sure that the government will talk about reducing the debt and will say that it has been reduced by $36 billion. That is true, since the peak to which the government brought it. It is down by $36 billion.
I have said before that I regret the fact I cannot use an overhead projector to show some graphs. Perhaps members and those watching on television could picture a graph showing debt going up and up. Finally in about 1997 it levelled off and the debt started to come down. The amount of debt is still approximately $49 billion more than when the government first took office. It is incredible that it has added all this debt. Sure, it brought the debt down in recent times but it could have done so much more.
There is another thing that comes into play here and I think it is really important. We talk about government debt and about the fact that children born nowadays have such a huge debt. I remember our former leader, the member for Calgary Southwest, using this example in his speech. He used to say that nowadays when babies are born, instead of the doctor slapping them on the back to get them to cry all the doctor does is hold them up by the heels and say “You owe us $17,000” and the babies start crying automatically. Obviously they would start to cry. We are doing our young people a huge disservice by bringing them into the world carrying a burden of debt. The fact that our government has been passive in the last five or six years when we had an opportunity to reduce that debt load substantially is a great affront to them.
Then what do we do to our young people? We add to their debt. When they get to go to university we give them student loans galore and tell them they had better pay them back. Other people can get clear of bankruptcy proceedings in three years, but not our students. We nail them for 10 years and make sure they pay back their loans.
I am not against paying back debt, but we load them down with debt instead of arranging affairs so that they can get their education and come out, as we did in our generation, with no or little debt. They now have huge debts. Then what happens? Finally they get a job and the rate of taxation in the country is so high at all levels of government that the poor wage earner gets to keep half of what he or she earns. This is incredible. In the United States people work from January 1 to the first week in May for the government and after that the their income is for themselves and their families. In Canada it is the full half-year. We have Canada Day on July 1. We should celebrate that we finally on that date have paid our taxes for the year. As a result Canadians are driven into personal debt. They are born with debt, we increase their debt while they are in school and when they finally get a job their disposable income is so low that they drive themselves into debt.
I have picked up a few statistics and have found that we now have in Canada an average household debt of some $53,000, compared to only $42,000 in 1990. Because of our huge tax loads and disposable incomes that are so low, people have to borrow to live. In the end they are throwing themselves into the bankruptcy courts in huge numbers and into the tax courts in some cases. That ought not to be. Meanwhile, personal savings are down by some 70% in the last 10 years. I was intrigued to see that Canadians, in just Visa and MasterCard alone, collectively have $110 billion dollars of debt. Why? Because they do not have disposable income.
In conclusion, the government must reduce the debt. That would allow the government to reduce taxes and give Canadians more take home pay. Everybody would be a lot better off.