The member for Winnipeg Centre says, “So they say”.
--and we found this over and over again. I remember the Liberals driving up the deficit year after year, in the seventies. Then the Mulroney government came in and said it was going to be fiscally conservative and it was going to take care of this deficit. In fact, it just kept driving it up and up.
Why the Conservatives have a good fiscal image with the public is just beyond me because every government that I ever look at, the Grant Devine government in Saskatchewan, any of these Conservative governments, preach a great line in opposition about how they are going to balance the books, how they are going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, how they are going to always give a hand up rather than a handout and all this right wing ideology. Then they get into power and do everything but what they said they were going to do in opposition and that whole fiscal conservatism just goes right out the window and they run huge deficits.
We do not want to get into what the Conservatives are doing right now because, in actual fact, they had to do something to deal with the issue. However, Preston Manning and his group would just be in shock right now. If we were able to look back 10 years ago and predict in the future that a Conservative government would own General Motors, it would be laughable. The Conservatives would be rolling in the aisles at their conventions over this issue.