No. The reason I do not have them is because I have copies of the budget and the numbers are not the same in different documents that are put out by the government. The best estimate I have is that in 1993 the debt was around $480 billion.
In a previous speech, I worked out that the Liberals were $280 billion in debt when they were defeated by the Conservatives in 1984. If we add the going rate of interest to that debt, it grows to $480 billion by 1993. If it had not been for the excesses of the Trudeau government, with Chrétien as the finance minister and his record deficits, and if that debt had not grown to $280 billion, the accumulated interest on that would not have been $480 billion when the Liberals took power in 1993. It is their debt.
The incredible thing is that in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was just a young man starting my career and the Trudeau government, the Liberals, were adding to the debt every year, some of us were saying that was not the way to go. All we need to do is look at the effect of compound interest added to debt and we know that it is not sustainable in the long run.
After nine years of the Liberals being in power, the Conservatives started to attack that. Had the Conservatives stayed in power, I can guarantee that we would be a lot better off than we are now because of the fact that they brought in policies that arranged for the Government of Canada to fight that deficit.
A lot of these members were elected in 1993. It was 12 years and a couple of days ago that we came here. I remember when we were speaking about tackling the deficit. I remember that first year we had a little plan called zero in three. We would balance the budget in three years. It cannot be done in one year. We had that plan and it was all set out with good economic forecasting. The Liberal opposition over there, which is the opposition to the Canadian taxpayers, kept saying all sorts of dastardly things about us.
I know we were on the right track because what we said we would do they said they would not do, but they had the policies that were in place at that stage and were able to accomplish deficit reduction until about 1997 when we had a balanced budget.
I would like to thank the Liberals for doing that but they could have done much better. We should look at the policies that the Liberal government has had and their out of control spending in so many areas. In the last five years government spending has gone up 50%.