Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his softball question. I assume he was trying to help me and not hinder me with that kind of light and fluffy intervention.
The fact is that the previous Progressive Conservative government, the Mulroney government, reduced the deficit as a percentage of GDP from 9% in 1984 to about 5% when it left office. What the Mulroney government inherited was a huge problem, in that it was like that old country and western song “give me forty acres and I will turn this rig around”. It took nine years just to slow down the velocity that Canada was heading in and in the wrong direction.
During that period not only did the government reduce the deficit as a percentage of GDP, but the government also implemented some of the most important and visionary structural changes to the Canadian economy in the last 50 years, including free trade, the GST and deregulation of financial services, transportation and energy. These were policies that recognized where Canada needed to be in the 21st century.
I wish I had an opportunity to ask the hon. member what his position was on free trade and on the GST. I believe, and correct me if I am wrong, that the hon. member was, as were most of the Liberal members opposite, vociferously opposed to some of those initiatives.
I would ask all members of the House, particularly those opposite, to recall their intransigence in opposition to some of those visionary changes. Today The Economist magazine is saying that it was those structural changes by the previous government that were responsible for the elimination of the deficit in Canada. It was not the pontificating Liberals on the other side of the House, but those in—