Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague suggested that she and her party wanted to ensure balanced books. I must say that I have seen no indication of that. Was she talking about the past 13 years? It was really 12 years, from November 1993 until January 2006. We keep hearing 13 years and it certainly is not 13 years but that is the interesting math of the NDP perhaps. She said that the NDP wanted to ensure balanced books when there was no indication, never any support from the NDP for any measure taken to balance the books, to make our economy stronger, to resolve the situation we had when our government took office in 1993 with the $42 billion deficit left over from the Conservatives, with terrible unemployment and grave problems across the country.
We went a long way over that period to improve the situation by investing in R and D, by investing in a whole range of areas, but also very importantly by getting the country's finances in order, something the NDP refused to support over and over. What did the NDP members do? They traded these measures for 10 seats and a chance to allow the Conservatives to become the government.
If things were so bad over those 12 years or so, how did Statistics Canada find that the percentage of low income Canadians declined from 15.7% in 1996 to 11.2% in 2004? Poverty declined. How can she possibly say that the reverse happened?