Madam Speaker, there is a pretty short answer to that. The member will, everyone watching will, everybody in this chamber will, even the hon. member who is the chair of the finance committee will have to pay for this mismanagement.
The hon. member was not here when Paul Martin was the finance minister, but he would talk about two things. He would talk about a vicious cycle and a virtuous cycle.
A vicious cycle is when we are constantly paying our debt, the debt keeps costing us more and the faster we run, the more the debt ratchets up.
A virtuous cycle is exactly the opposite. A virtuous cycle was entered into in 1997 and it basically ended in 2007. The virtuous cycle is that when we started to pay down our debt and deficit the interest rates would go down with it, and so we could actually pay it down faster. It is a simple concept to understand. Anybody who owns a mortgage understands that if interest rates actually decline and their payments remain the same, the principal amount of the mortgage goes down more quickly. That is a virtuous cycle.
The current government has reversed that. We are now in the vicious cycle. We have ratcheted up the deficit and interest rates are sure to follow.