Mr. Speaker, as a former banker, I do agree with debt reduction but I do not believe that Canada's debt, before the surplus was used to pay it down, was unmanageable.
My constituents have likened it to two people who get married and buy a house. They take out a mortgage and sacrifice everything. They have no life and they have nothing of consequence. They want to pay off the mortgage but in the meantime they have no quality of life. They cannot maintain the house when the roof gets leaky or the foundation falls apart. At the end of the day, the mortgage is paid off but the house needs to be razed. They then must go back into debt to rebuild it at today's prices.
The easy answer to the member's question is that debt reduction is not the only thing that is absolutely critical in this country and I think we are living it now.