Thank you very much for the question.
I have the sense that there was more than one question in there. I will certainly start with what I perceive to be the first one and deal with the question around the deficit that was left for us from the Conservatives.
I guess the analogy I can use is a family that has two earners. One of them earns $50,000 a year. She works all 12 months of the year, getting that 1/12th each month of the year. The other person works for the first six months of the year. He has a seasonal job. At the end of the first six months, he no longer works for the last six months of the year. This same family has a situation where their mortgage, for whatever reason, has been designed so that they pay $500 a month for the first 10 months of the year and in the last two months of the year they pay $1,000 a month.
Let's just assume we're this family for a minute. I don't think that family would look at their situation three-quarters of the way through the year and say, “Good news: we are in a surplus situation from a family standpoint.” They would look at it and say, “Oh, we need to consider the fact that our revenues go down in the second half of the year and our expenses go up.”
I will tell you, Mr. Chair, that if we take a look at what happens with the revenues and the expenses for the Government of Canada, what we can see over the last number of years—we've gone through the numbers year by year by year—is that in the last two months of the year, we have a reduction in revenues and an increase in expenses.
What that leads to is a situation where you cannot look at one half of the year, and you certainly cannot look at one month or another month, and come to any conclusions about our situation. I want to make it very clear: we took a look at the finances left us from the previous government, and we found that we would be put into a deficit for calendar year 2015-16.
Perhaps I can go on a little longer, Mr. Chair, if—