Mr. Speaker, I may be young at 34 but I remember the red book in 1993 and the election campaign that year. The Liberals came to power. Nobody was talking about tax relief, paying down the debt, or any of those types of things. In fact, the red book was a recipe for handing over one's chequebook. There was more and more spending.
But surprise, there was a protest party out west, one of the legacy parties of this Conservative Party. It elected a surprising number of members of Parliament. They came to Ottawa and pushed for things such as eliminating the deficit, zero in three, I think it was back then. There were some surprising ideas that interestingly enough were not in the red book.
Where did the current conditions for today's economy come from? They did not come from ideas from that bench. They came from the official opposition. They came from the Conservative Party's fighting to put the fiscal house in order.
Bill C-48 on the other hand, to get back to the debate at hand, is a recipe for returning to deficits. Combine this with some of the Liberals' other $26 billion in spending promises since the Prime Minister showed up on national television to beg for his political life. They have a $10 billion per year unfunded liability for a national day care system. Put this all together and it is a recipe for higher taxes, program cuts or borrowing the money to pay for them. That is fiscal irresponsibility.
The Liberals have allowed the NDP in because the government needed to be propped up. This is the way the Liberals do it. It is a recipe for deficit spending. It is irresponsible and I look forward to opposing it.