Mr. Speaker, the government has established the practice of maintaining a contingency reserve and an extra amount of prudence for the very specific reason of making sure that we do not slip back into the red ink, into deficit once again, but can in emergency circumstances deal with the urgent problems of Canadians.
In this past year we proved the value of that. We had to deal with SARS. We had to deal with BSE. We had to deal with the hurricane. We had to deal with massive forest fires. We dealt with all of them and stayed solidly in the black.