Mr. Speaker, when the Liberals inherited a $42 billion Conservative deficit, there was no painless way to get out of it.
The hon. parliamentary secretary may recall at the time that the Wall Street Journal said Canada would become a third world country. People were saying the IMF had to come in and manage our economy because the previous Conservative government had taken us up to unheard of debt levels. Therefore, the Liberal government came in and had to clean up the mess.
When we have a huge great mess to clean up, we do not do it totally painlessly. In fact, it may be, as he said, a fifth Liberal majority, although I do not know when the fourth one was, but if there is a Liberal government at some time in the future, we will inherit a huge fat Conservative deficit one more time. I suppose again, as in the past and as usual, the Liberal Party will be called upon to deal with the big fat juicy Conservative deficit and clean up the mess.
Unlike those Conservatives, who pretend that all of this can be done totally painlessly, which is absolutely untrue, I would acknowledge that there is likely to be a certain amount of pain in cleaning up a big fat deficit. They are not even acknowledging in their plan that there will be a certain amount of pain, that we cannot simply freeze government budgets and departmental budgets forever and expect every social program to remain intact—