Mr. Speaker, I will be speaking shortly about the budget, so I will limit myself to one question for the right hon. member.
I do not understand for the life of me how he can boast about his own government's record when it was the Conservatives who left this government in 1993 with a $42 billion deficit. That was absolutely central to the first several years of this government. That was why the Wall Street Journal said Canada was about to become a third world country.That was why we had to cut foreign aid, among other things, to get us out of this Tory hole.
Now that we are finally out of the Tory hole, we are restoring foreign aid and health care and we are cutting taxes.
How he can claim that he left us a wonderful legacy of a $42 billion deficit, from which we emerged only several years ago, is quite beyond my capacity to understand.