Madam Speaker, if there are limits to the Alliance's affinity for privatization, it is good to know it, but I notice that the National Post was kind of soft on this idea today in its editorial, so by next week the hon. member might be singing a different tune. He should not be so sure that his party is dead set against this, because the people who really call the shots in the hon. member's political culture might be entertaining a different notion.
With respect to the question about the low dollar, I wish life were as simple as the member makes it out to be. It seems to me that right after the free trade agreement when we had the very deficits that the government has sought to eliminate, we had a high dollar. In fact, one of the conspiracy theories at the time was that there had been an agreement to keep the Canadian dollar high so that the free trade agreement could not work to Canada's advantage. That was within the ambit of the free trade argument itself. That was at a time when the government had not dealt with the debt and the deficit.
Now the government has dealt with the debt, much to the damage of our social programs and of a lot of individual Canadians because of the way it was done, and the dollar is low. We have been assured for five or six years now that the government got the fundamentals right. How long do we need to have the fundamentals right? Is it a sentence? Do we have to get the fundamentals right for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years?
I say that to the member in the sense that I do not think it is as simple as that. I do not think it just has to do with fiscal policy. I am not sure exactly how it works. I am not sure anybody is exactly sure how it works. I am sure the Minister of Finance sometimes goes to bed at night wondering how it works and why the Canadian dollar is the way it is. However, just to assume that if we were to adopt Canadian Alliance policies somehow the dollar would go up is a bit on the simplistic side.