Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you witnesses all for coming out.
Mr. Robidoux, at the end of March of this year, 2013, it is my understanding that our deficit had hit a figure of something less than $19 billion—I think about $18.9 billion. In the budgetary information in the report, there was a deficit projection of $26.3 billion set in 2012. There were earlier comments that we're “in a time”. There's no surprise in that. We're coming out of the recession. Or we're out of it. We know that global growth is still fairly weak. We need to continue to work on exports. We look for diversification in our agreements to export into countries besides our closest partner and neighbour to the south.
Revenues increased by an amount of about $7.5 billion. I think that's about 3% up from 2011 to 2012. I'm just trying to grasp this. Our deficit has come down. Our revenues have increased at a time when global problems still strongly exist. These higher tax revenue come at a time when taxes in Canada are at a 50-year low. I'm speaking of individuals and, particularly in my riding, small businesses, which make up about 98% of the economy in our country.
I'm just trying to understand what that means to a family, what it means to a small business. How does it work? It seems counterintuitive that in a time of economic growth we've had increases in revenue, lower taxes, and we've been able to pay down the deficit ahead of what we were projecting. I'm just wondering, do you have any comments as to how that actually works, a kind of Economics 101 that most of us can understand?