Thank you, Madam Chair.
I was in mid-thought about the impact of those deficits. What we saw with the deficits and the significant debt taken on under Pierre Trudeau was a circumstance similar to what we're looking at right now, where the next nine years under a Conservative government.... I know that my Liberal friends, in the early days of their government, liked to shout out across the floor that the Mulroney deficits were the biggest in Canadian history at the time. It's important to point out that the Mulroney deficits during that time in government were entirely interest on the debt run up by the Trudeau government of the seventies and early eighties. They were entirely interest. Other than interest, the budgets were in balance.
The real bill didn't come due then, though. The real bill came due in 1995. Some of us are old enough to remember 1995, although perhaps not the member directly across the table from me. In 1995, those of us who were around will remember that the government of the day, with Paul Martin as finance minister—the Chrétien-Martin government of the day—because of a drop in our credit rating, had to cut by 32% what I think was called the Canada social transfer at the time. Billions and billions of dollars in one shot were cut from spending in transfers to the provinces for health care, social services and education over a two-year period, from 1995 to 1997.
I know that some on this committee share my interest in international development. Do you know what our lowest level of spending in international development was? It was in the early 2000s and was still coming out of those cuts under the Chrétien-Martin government. I think we were down to around 0.21% of ODA. Our ODA was—