Madam Speaker, I hope my response will be proportionate to the length of the question. I will just continue until Madam Speaker decides somewhere around midnight that I have said enough.
My hon. friend talked about debt. The fact is the debt is higher now than when the federal Liberals took over from the Tories who ran the debt up back in 1993. That is the bare fact of the matter. The other fact is we have asked and Canadians have asked very clearly that the debt be reduced continually.
During the last election--and we do not want to rehash that for obvious reasons as it is a little painful--we asked that the debt reduction be legislated, that the government be required every year to put a certain amount toward the debt. It is called a mortgage. The federal government and the former finance minister said “Trust us. We will always pay down debt”. The first chance the Liberals had, they did not. They abandoned paying down the debt.
If the member wants to talk about my record as minister of finance, we legislated the paying down of debt. We know that one thing about government. It should be limited. We cannot trust even honourable legislators like ourselves with masses of money because we dream about how to spend it on behalf of the hard working people who gave it to us. It has to be legislated.
The former finance minister promised that the debt would continue to be paid down. The promise was not fulfilled.
In terms of the surplus, almost every financial observer has said that there has been a surplus at the hands of the federal government. The main reasons were the fiscal policies, like them or not, of Ontario and Alberta which resulted in pretty significant business rebounds, diversification of the economy and therefore more revenues to the federal government. There was also the low Canadian dollar. Those were the main factors in terms of a surplus.
An hon. member just mentioned the GST. I am going to give him that one. That raked in a pile of money for the federal government.
The government raised taxes, it slashed services and it raided the provinces that had the courage to do the right thing. That is why it had a surplus. The Liberals blew it out the window, did not put anything down on the debt and moved and hid billions of dollars into arm's length agencies.