Mr. Speaker, I am reluctant to go back to the flag controversy. However I want to set the record straight. The hon. member indicated that somehow it was this party that started that controversy. That is not true.
As a matter of fact it was a Liberal member who said that we should display these flags when the member from the Bloc came back. I am venturing a guess that he had a flag on his desk as most of us did on that one day of parliamentary insurrection.
I do not like the fact that he is only attributing that to us. The member from the Bloc who triggered it is actually smiling at me right now and I appreciate that smile. I was involved because when one of the separatists asked me to remove it I did not want to do it and that escalated things. I say that for the record.
I would like to talk about the comments he made about our plan to lead us into a deficit. That is not accurate. When I look back at our history I see that we were more accurate than the government every time in anticipating the results of the fiscal plan. With our limited resources in research we did better than the finance department with all its highly paid, expensive gurus and experts. When the finance minister in the last couple of years underestimated the income by up to $7 billion a year we were almost squat on.
In 1993 we had a zero in three plan which was for the government to stop borrowing within three years. The government had many things to say about that such as the country would fall apart. We projected accurately and indeed in three years the Liberal government had the books balanced as we predicted.
Then it boasted that it had done it. No. It had little to do with it. It happened despite the government. We were able to accurately read the economic direction of not only this country but our neighbours to the south who influence us so greatly. We saw what was happening. Our predictions were squat on.
One could argue that it does not matter whether we are on the government side or not since we can accomplish the same thing from this side. We could do much better than the Liberals on that side because we would have accurate predictions.
The hon. member is saying that this would take us back into a deficit. That is not so. The plan we are projecting repriorizes spending in such a way that the wasteful spending would be gone. Those new priorities for Canadians would be met, and there would be no deficit. There will be under the Liberal government if it keeps on allowing different pet projects to go forward and with spending on all sorts of projects.