Mr. Speaker, I was truly amused by this speech. It is a good way to start a Friday morning to have, shall we say, a jokester on the hustings here.
I do not know, but these Liberals keep talking about how they inherited a $35 billion debt. First of all, it was not a debt. It was a deficit. Every year the government was borrowing more money than it was taking in. It was spending and borrowing money and putting us further and further into debt.
I remember that in 1993 when we were campaigning I had a computer clock set up at some of the trade fairs. It showed how the debt was growing and how we were going to attack the debt.
It is true that the Conservative government under Mulroney for those nine years made only one error, that is, it did not sufficiently address the issue of the debt it had inherited from the Liberals. That debt came totally from the years of rampant spending and overspending by the Liberal government.
I did the math at the time and was able to prove not only to others but also to myself that this was correct. The debt had simply grown, with compound interest, to where it was so huge that it was growing at the rate of $1,000 per second. It was totally untenable for us to put that kind of debt load onto our young people and our next generation.
We fought against that. I am very proud to be able to say that we were part of changing the culture in this place so that we stopped that interminable borrowing. The member says the Liberals did it. Yes, that is true, in that the Liberal government finally succumbed to the pressure and to the reality that they could not sustain that kind of borrowing, but please, let us remember that the debt was a Liberal debt from 1970 or 1972 onward until it had grown into the hundreds of billions of dollars.