Sure we do, and Mr. Speaker, I am not ignoring you. I would never do that. I am just responding to the heckling of the member across the way, because I do not know what world he is on, but it is not this one.
In fact, if we take a look at the Government of Canada right now, at our country compared to the G-8, we are the only one with a balanced budget, with a surplus, paying down our debt. I do not know where the member is coming from.
Fifth is to implement a system of full accrual accounting, on the longstanding advice of the Auditor General, to improve the way that the federal government presents its financial statements. Quite frankly, one of the reasons we are able to get to accrual accounting this time is that our financial house is in such good order.
Last is to legislate the termination of the debt servicing and reduction account. We have not limited ourselves to responding only to the suggestions of the Auditor General to improve how we serve Canadians. Budget 2003 announced measures to review current spending to make government more accountable and a better manager of tax dollars. To this end, our government is committed to re-examining government programs to ensure that they are relevant, affordable and efficient.
To that point, when we go through this program review, as I have said before, we want to find the most efficient way of spending the tax dollars. So we can take a look at the programs now and I believe we should start classifying and categorizing them as to what are high priority programs and what are low priority programs. From that, I believe that we can have more efficient spending of tax dollars by targeting high priority programs first and then diminishing funding down to low priorities.
Being more accountable to Canadians also means looking carefully at reallocating government spending, as I have said, from lower to higher priority areas, from less efficient to more effective. In practical terms, this means that beginning in 2003-04 the federal government will reallocate $1 billion per year from existing spending, which will be used to fund those things that matter most to Canadians.
To wrap everything up, we have to take a look at where this country was back in 1993 and where we are today in 2003. By this October, this government will have been on this side of the House for 10 years. Quite frankly, when we came here we inherited a government that was overspending by $42.5 billion a year. We inherited a government that had its debt ratio, accumulated public debt versus GDP, up to almost 70%. We had a government that was actually spending between 14% to 16% of GDP.