Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment to the chair. We are very proud of the fact that you have been selected.
I would like to respond to one of the things the hon. member opposite said. She said something about the government inheriting such a fine fiscal position from the previous government. I wonder whether she has ever stopped to consider the reasons the previous Liberal government was able to balance the books. There were a number of reasons. One of them was that the Conservatives howled about it until finally the government was pressured into doing it, but it was also the policies of free trade, which bring about $1.5 billion everyday into this country. That was what the Liberal Party campaigned against and that is what has given it to a great extent the fiscal gift which has permitted it to balance the budget and stop the interminable borrowing.
I would also like to point out the GST, which the Liberals said they would eliminate in their campaign. I remember Mr. Chrétien saying during an election campaign that it would be gone. That GST brought in billions of dollars and using that money the Liberals were able to balance the budget. I think also of the $30 billion that they took out of the civil service employees pension fund, who were entitled to half of that. Half of it belonged to the employees. I think about the $50 billion they took out of the EI fund.
The ways in which they balanced the budget and gave us presumed fiscal health is questionable at best. Let us not forget that in fact the amount of debt that the Liberals left the Conservatives when we took office on January 23 is pretty well the same as the debt that they had in 1993. I think they should probably be a little more sensitive to where all this money came from. I would appreciate the comments of the hon. member on these things.