Mr. Speaker, I must profess to being a little shocked as I think the hon. member's comments have gone beyond the scope of Bill C-33. I would have thought you might have reprimanded him for that but since you did not, I would assume he is in order.
Certainly I am an admirer of Mr. Diefenbaker. I am just old enough to remember him. I used to enjoy listening to his French when my French was not very good. An anglophone listening to him could understand every word of his French.
I do not think he was uniformly perfect. I think he cancelled the Avro Arrow. He was nevertheless, I am sure, a great prime minister in many ways and I do not deny that. My only point is that numbers were not his forte because he ran seven consecutive deficits. The story is that Lester Pearson almost fired his speech writer because Mr. Pearson had a bit of a lisp and instead of saying “seven consecutive deficits“, he said something like “theven conthecutive defithits” and the speech writer almost got fired. That is why it stuck in my mind.
But, it is a fact that he did run seven consecutive deficits and it therefore goes along with my hypothesis. We can go from Diefenbaker, to Mulroney, to Harris, to Ronald Regan and George W. Bush south of the border, who were all examples of Conservative or Republican leaders who ran huge deficits and left big fiscal messes for their Liberal or Democratic successors to clean up.