Madam Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North is on the finance committee and I thought she had a better familiarity with the economic numbers of the government.
It is interesting that only the NDP would turn a good news story into a bad news story, where we have had seven years of surpluses which have contributed close to $50 billion to paying down the debt. This saves taxpayers every year about $4 billion, which is an annuity into the future. It is money that can be redeployed into social programs and economic programs.
I remember that the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot one day at the finance committee made the case that he could predict the numbers better on his laptop computer. He brought his laptop computer to the finance committee and tried to make the case that his laptop could produce better stats than eight of the leading economists in Canada. I found that amusing to say the least.
Here we have a situation where the government gets eight of Canada's leading economists and they produce an estimate based on the trends, the economic forecasts and they come up with a consensus view. Now can we improve the system? Perhaps we can, and that is why the government has agreed to look at it.
Let me just cite one example. If the Minister of Finance, in predicting his revenues, is out by 1% and at the same time he is out by 1% on the expenditures, just a 1% error on the revenues and the expenditures would produce a differential in the surplus of about $3.8 billion. In other words, if the government predicted no surplus, it could be a $3.8 billion difference either way. So that is what we are talking about, these margins for error. A 1% difference in the expenditures and the revenues can produce a gap of $3.8 billion.
The member had some other numbers wrong as well. The member for Winnipeg North contended that we have not really achieved our fifty-fifty goal. That is not correct. I know it is absolutely true we have not made the fifty-fifty goal in terms of allocating between social and economic programs on one hand and tax cuts and paying down the debt on the other. The numbers are something like 45-55, but they are not even close to the numbers that the member for Winnipeg North threw out of 90% and 10%. I would love to see the math on that. I would love to see the numbers because they are patently wrong.
In fact if we look at the government expenditures in the last two or three years, about 80% of them have gone toward transfers to the provinces for health care and for social programs.
My question for the member for Winnipeg North is, what is the source of her numbers? Because they do not make any sense.