Mr. Speaker, the hon. member opposite has brought up a couple of very important issues. One is that I am glad he recognizes one of our big issues with the deficit, which the Liberals continually point to a previous government and which occurred during a major recession. It did cause a great deal of harm to the economy at that time.
The problem is every year we go through this with the government. There is a certain planned surplus, but it always ends up to be way more than we expected. As a result, Canadians have been taxed and money was been taken out of their pockets for services that they did not receive. If we are going to pay down the debt, and it is appropriate that we should and this party has had a plan for doing that, we should plan that as part of the budget and not hope that at the end of the year there is money left over and we will pay it down.
The other part of this equation is that as the federal government is racking up surpluses, a number of the provinces have been racking up deficits. Part of that is because we put responsibility on the provincial governments to do those things that the federal government should do.
All in all, our policy still is that we plan surpluses or we plan to pay down debt. We do not plan to pay down debt and still have huge surpluses.