Mr. Speaker, the measure of success is not a matter of where one is, but a measure of how far one has come from where one started.
During this debate we have had a number of suggestions that somehow the Liberal record is not worth boasting about, and I would like to clarify that for the House.
In 1993 we inherited from a Conservative government, which was in power from 1984 to 1993, an unholy mess. There was a $42 billion deficit. Our overall debt had ballooned to stifling proportions, equaling almost 70% of our gross domestic product. Deficit financing was a bad habit. Interest charges were high. There was no real economic growth. Job creation was essentially nil and our economic sovereignty was in jeopardy. We were even compared to a third world country. This is a sad legacy of a Conservative government.
Let us see what happened in the next 12 years, from 1993 up to the last election.
The government cleaned up the nation's finances, restored Canada's financial sovereignty and re-established the federal government's ability to invest properly in Canadians' leading social and economic priorities, while at the same time balancing the books, reducing its debt and coping with unforeseeable external shocks. We balanced the books in 1997. We brought down eight consecutive surplus budgets with five more balanced budgets projected in the future. We reduced the federal debt, in absolute terms, by more than $63 billion. As a proportion of the total--