Mr. Fisher:

Good luck.

Mr. Fisher:

Canadians are saving well over 10 per cent of their available income.

Mr. Fisher:

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to see that the Liberal leadership race has attracted such a wide range of interest. The fact that it has reached the Hon. Member for Brampton-Georgetown (Mr. McDermid) shows that it has indeed been a successful campaign.

Supply

The Hon. Member can check the "blues" or Hansard, but I said in my speech that I would lower the deficit. 1 believe that we can do that in three ways. First, we can do it by making the economic pie larger, which will simply increase government revenue. I am sure that we both agree about that.

Second, we can increase government revenues by increasing taxes. The Member for St. John's West said that this morning. As the Hon. Member knows, that will happen in the fall when some of the increases in federal taxes, particularly the federal wholesale tax, come in.

Third, I believe we can reduce the deficit by reducing spending, but only very carefully. That is what I am trying to emphasize to the Hon. Member. Some of that spending will decrease automatically as demands for unemployment insurance and as demands on the Canada Assistance Program and some of the other social transfer programs decrease. We have an obligation obviously to decrease it beyond that, but in order to do so we must be very careful and sensitive to the needs of the individual.

Mr. Fisher:

The personal savings rate in the United States, on a per capita basis, is almost half of ours.

Mr. Fisher:

I looked at the list of priorities provided by the Hon. Member for St. John's West (Mr. Crosbie). They revealed nothing more than the traditional Tory love of money, a pandering to the provinces, a willingness to bow and scrape to any foreign influence, and a desire to run away from the kind of constructive partnership that I have described between the Canadian Government and the Canadian people.

Liberals put people first. We use the Government to soften outside blows.