Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member's question were not so comical it would warrant probably a more serious response.
He has a very selective memory. I am not that old. I have only been a member for 11 years, but I know why I became involved in politics. It was not just because of my concern about the debt that was growing, as he states, under the Progressive Conservative government that preceded the three terms of fiscal terror by Jean Chrétien. I was concerned well beyond that. I think most Canadians were concerned about who actually started deficit spending in this country and who saw it balloon to unbelievable proportions. That was the successive administrations of Pierre Trudeau.
The member selectively pulls out one part of history and says that we cannot see that happen again. I would like to say that we cannot see a lot of things happen that happened in the past.
I would also like to remind the member of something else. I remember this because I ran in the 1988 election. I was not successful; I lost. That election was known as the free trade election. I well remember the hon. member's leader at the time, John Turner, railing against free trade and how it would be the end of Canada.
Now the Liberal government over the past 11 years has been the net beneficiary of the policies of the Progressive Conservative government, of the free trade vision of that Progressive Conservative government, the very policies that the Liberals ranted and railed and fought against so vehemently. The Liberals said that free trade would be the destruction of Canada. Now the government is benefiting. Now we do not hear the Liberals saying that. Now, all of a sudden, they are proponents of free trade. The Liberals have seen the light; they have had this epiphany.
As well, the Liberals fought against the GST. I am not a great proponent of the GST. I think it has its problems. Where does the government get its money? Where does the government get the overtaxation from?
Canadians out in the real world are not fooled. They understand quite well that it is overtaxation. Maybe the member does not want to admit that the government has taken billions of dollars more in the last few years than it could possibly squander. Canadians know about that.
Canadians know to whom the surplus belongs. That was the point of my speech, to point out that we in the Conservative Party of Canada understand that that money rightfully belongs to Canadian taxpayers and it should be returned to them. I look forward to the budget in two or three weeks' time. I hope that the Liberal government will honour the commitment in the throne speech of last October and we will see the substantive tax cuts that will result in a net pay increase. We often hear the Liberals talk about all these billions of dollars in tax cuts that the Liberals have initiated, but no one out in the real world has seen them on his or her paycheque.