I want to drill into a couple of those things.
You may be right to not look at any particular month or year, but I'm going to look at, say, the last six years, because I think the better part of a decade is a representative sample. Canada has gone from an $18-billion current account surplus in 2006, when your government took power, to a deficit of $67 billion this year. That's an $85-billion swing in a little over six years. It's also a trend that has been getting worse. Qualitatively, our value-added exports as a percentage of overall exports have been declining, and we have a merchandise trade deficit approaching $100 billion. That's on the gross numerical side.
In terms of your explanation of exports and referring to the global economy, Mr. Minister, we asked the Library of Parliament to look at 17 other countries around the world with economies of various sizes and approaches that have had to deal with exactly the same global challenges as Canada, including the U.K., Spain, Chile, Japan, Australia, the U.S., Germany, Mexico, etc., for the same time period as we have statistics for your government, 2006 to 2012.
World Bank statistics, which is where we got the numbers from, show that over that time eight countries have been running current account surpluses, five countries have been running deficits, but those deficits have been improving, and five countries have been running deficits that have been deteriorating. Canada was in dead-last place at the 18th spot with the worst performance over those countries, and they're dealing with exactly the same global conditions, commodity prices, currency fluctuations, and the global recession.
What would account, Mr. Minister, for Canada's trade performance? Why is it so poor relative to that of our competitors?