Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also want to thank my colleagues for inviting me here today to talk about the government's plan for reducing and eventually eliminating the deficit. The plan is designed to manage government spending, monitor our program results to date and establish safeguards for the future.
The International Monetary Fund has said that Canada is an economic miracle. The International Monetary Fund is not usually given to divine pronouncements. The OECD has said that Canada's economy shines. The World Economic Forum says that Canada has had the strongest financial platform for the last three years of any other country in the world. There are significant reports by Stats Canada of over 400,000 jobs created since June 2009. I would suggest that doesn't happen by accident but by certain policies and principles being in place, but I won't take the time to go into all of those.
I'd like to get right to the point of some questions the Parliamentary Budget Officer has raised relative to our plan and make some overriding comments.
First of all, we do have a plan. It's very clear. It's laid out in a number of budget documents. The plan is one that I think you are familiar with. We show a very clear deficit reduction. We show a deficit of $45.4 billion in 2010-11, and then the next year you'll see a reduction, where it will drop to $29.88 billion. Of course, you have all these documents, I'm sure, in both official languages. That will be a result largely of the end of our economic action plan--$19 billion will no longer flow forward--and $1.28 billion in restraint measures, including operating budget freezes.
For 2012-13, we see another drop of $8.8 billion. That's due to $2 billion in restraint measures and economic growth. Then in 2013-14 it moves to $11.5 billion, finally coming to $1.78 billion in 2014-15--