Mr. Speaker, when I speak of debt from birth to death in this country that comprises pretty well every citizen of the country, so I am not concerned about not having that appeal to people right across the country.
The parliamentary secretary talks about the debt reduction. By the way, I should also take a moment here to make a correction. I think I said the debt is now $49 billion more than when the Liberals took office. I was in error. It is just a little less than $40 billion. It is $39 billion, so I made a little error in my mental arithmetic on the run and my apologies for that. That does not happen often, but it did this time.
The member wants me to praise him for reducing the debt. In fact, I reluctantly do so. I am glad that the Liberals have stopped increasing it. I am glad that they did not invent more ways of spending money. They invented enough. I applaud them for at least beginning to reduce the debt.
For the parliamentary secretary to say that they ought to get a lot of credit for this is like me telling you, Mr. Speaker, or anybody else, that at Christmastime I will lose 20 pounds. What I will not say is that at the same time I will gain 30. What I will do is gain a little, lose a little, gain a little and lose a little, and the sum of my losses will be 20 pounds. I guarantee it. In total I will have gained 10 pounds because I gained 30 while I lost 20.
This is what the government has done. I pointed out that in my speech. It started at $508 billion. First, it increased the debt by $75 billion. Now it has reduced it by $36 billion and it wants us to cheer. Of course we will cheer for the government reducing it to $36 billion, but it is not even back to where it started in 1993.
It is also very important for me to say, yes, let us keep on that track. There is a lot of money that the government could have had. Rather, it chose to spend. I believe that collectively it has overshot its own spending projections. If we add up the amount by which it has overspent each budget since it has taken power, it adds up to $20 billion or $30 billion. That should have been used to reduce the debt.
I find it interesting that the $36 billion by which the debt is down from its peak is exactly equal to the amount of cumulative overpayments in the EI fund. In other words, the government has managed to squander all of the other surpluses, or whatever. I do not know what the government is doing with them. In just the EI fund alone the surpluses have paid for the debt reduction and I think that is the wrong source from which to take money for that.