Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the hon. member and I thank him for his comments, particularly about Liberals balancing budgets. They sure did. I had the unusual privilege of being a Minister of Finance in the second largest government in this country, in Ontario, and we had to try to operate a health care system with the federal government balancing its books by cutting back health transfers to the provinces.
We lived through that and the deterioration of the health care system, which was done by the previous government and which it created simply by saying, “We are going to balance our books. Here is how we are going to do it. We are going to cut our health transfers willy-nilly, across the board, to every province in this country”.
It was a cynical act, but that is how the Liberals thought they should balance the books in Canada. It is not how we see balancing the books.
In fact, we are engaged now in what I hope will be quite fruitful and constructive discussions with our colleagues in the provinces and territories. We are not talking about cutting health care. In fact, we will maintain health care funding. We are committed to that, with a 6% escalator built into the base.
We are also talking about substantial transfer payments with respect to infrastructure and post-secondary education. It is just the kind of progressive legislation and progressive approach that ought to have been taken on by the previous government, but no, what the Liberals did instead was just cut health care transfers willy-nilly and tell the provinces and the people of the provinces that they had to figure it out.