Mr. Speaker, I had totally not intended to speak in this debate. I know that some people are eager to get out of here, but I could not let this debate stop where it is.
The parliamentary secretary made a statement and the Liberals are trying to pin our country's debt on Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives at that time. I tried to do that in 1993 when I was running for Parliament against the local Conservative candidate as well as the Liberal. The fact of the matter is that Brian O'Kurley, who was a member of Parliament during that time, got up during the all candidates debates and he kept on saying that in 1984 the Conservatives had inherited this debt from the Liberals. He said that the Conservatives had a balanced budget on program spending and that they did not spend more on programs than the money they took in.
I believe in dealing honestly with people. As I said before, being a mathematician I checked the figures out. Since this issue has come up this afternoon, I got out my little scientific calculator which I never leave home without, and I calculated the numbers.
I do not know whether the numbers given from the other side are accurate. Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact debt way back in those years, but I am going to use the numbers that the member used. I will accept that in 1984 the debt was $198 billion on the premise that he is correct and that it grew to $498 billion. Those are the numbers that he used. We will use those for this illustration.
The ratio of that debt is about two and a half times. In other words it grew in nine years to two and a half times its original size. All we have to do is take the ninth root of two to find out the interest rate. That is exactly what I did in just a few seconds. It comes to 10.7916749 to be precise, but it is basically 10.8%. That was the going interest rate during those years.
We could say that the Liberals over a number of years spent way more money on programs and waste than they took in. They borrowed money year after year. The debt grew to $198 billion by 1984 when the Liberals were properly turfed out.
Then the Conservatives had a short time of nine years during which they balanced the budget. They did not spend more on programs. As I said before, they could be held accountable for not attacking the debt and the deficit sooner. We could say that, but the amount of the deficit every year was equal to the interest payable on that debt that they had inherited. That is the fact.
The sum of $198 billion compounded annually at 10.8% over nine years is worth $498 billion. It is a shameful Liberal legacy that we have in our national debt.
The Liberals like to crow that they have brought this under control. I remind members that in 1993 when we first stood on this side and started hammering them on the deficit and the debt, we were called every unsavoury name in the English language, and probably the French language too. I guess that is one time I was glad I did not understand French, when they were calling us all sorts of names.
The Liberals were really ripping into us because we were so un-Canadian. We wanted to stop the spending and the borrowing which was putting our future generations into more debt. The Liberals finally came around.
Herb Grubel was our finance critic at that time. He wrote a very fascinating book when he retired from politics after one term. One of the things that he confessed in his book was that from time to time the finance minister, now the Prime Minister, would say to him privately, “Keep up the pressure. I have so much pressure from within my party to keep spending a bunch of money. I know that for the good of this country we need to bring down the debt”.
So the Prime Minister, then the finance minister, did bring down the debt, but it was at the pressure of the then Reform Party, and he was asking for that pressure because he needed the legitimization of his point of view.
I want to point out another thing. The Liberals keep crowing about how well they have done in managing the finances. When we look at the $1 billion or $2 billion they spend just at the flip of a finger on a gun registry or at the money wasted in an ad scam and all of the other mismanagement of the government, let us just think about how much we could have done if they had managed the money properly.
There is another point. In 1993 the Liberals were campaigning against free trade. The effect of free trade in this country right now is a huge financial gain. I think it is $1.5 billion every day. They spoke against it. If it were not for the implementation of free trade by the then Conservative government, would we be, even now, in the position that we are in? The Liberals themselves admit that our debt is down as a percentage of GDP. The debt has gone down by only a very small amount relative to its size when they took over, but they take the ratio of the GDP, and because the GDP has grown substantially, mostly due to free trade, obviously the debt is down as a percentage of the GDP.
I do not want to take a whole lot of time here, but I just could not allow these misconceptions to go unchallenged. I want to just simply say that in the end to the taxpayers I guess that looking backward is not going to help them a lot. We cannot drive a semi, as I did for many years, by looking in the rear-view mirror.
Let us stop trying to place the blame, maybe, but let us place it correctly if we are. Rather, let us rather look ahead. I am saying this simply. We need to implement in our policies plans that will reduce the debt and the deficit so that we have smaller interest payments and more money available--instead of less--to spend on the programs that Canadians value.
We need to make sure that we manage government properly and honestly and that there is not all of this waste, mismanagement and corruption. I hate to use that word, but it is very evident in the present milieu of the inquiry by Mr. Justice Gomery. There is so much evidence now that there is actual corruption in there. It has to stop. I call on Canadians very frankly to turf this government, because the Liberals will not wake up to the moral challenge before them until they have what we call for our grandchildren “a time out”. I think it is time that the Liberals got a time out.