Mr. Speaker, when we took office in 1993 we discovered to our amazement that there were a number of obligations of the government that had not been accounted for. There were commitments looking ahead which had not been booked into the numbers. In fact a fair amount of clean-up had to be done. I wish the auditor general at that point had insisted on a far greater degree of transparency.
We took the decision at that point that the books of this government would be more transparent than anybody else's books and that Canadians would understand exactly the financial situation of the country, and that we would not hide numbers. That is what we have done in this particular case.