The member mentions Trudeau. Canada had a consecutive AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's from 1951 on, all through the Trudeau years. Do members know when it was downgraded? In 1992. Who was the prime minister? Brian Mulroney. What was the deficit? It was $30 billion to $40 billion. Standard & Poor's downgraded Canada under the Conservative regime. Under Trudeau, it had been AAA all the way.
We can detect a pattern emerging. There was a $5.6 billion deficit under Harris and Eves and our current finance minister, with the worst thing about that being the fact that they claimed it was a balanced budget, so they were lying. They only got caught because they lost the election and the auditors came in and went through every single item. They left a $5.6 billion deficit and left Dalton McGuinty to clean up the mess.
What do members think happened when Kim Campbell came in? She had a $42 billion deficit. She ran and was left with two seats. Who was left to clean up the Conservative mess? The Liberals. This is the sad fate of Liberals. It has been our lot in Canadian history and our lot in Ontario history that we are always called in to clean up these Conservative fiscal messes.
Someone has to do the job, so when the Liberals came in in 1993, Mr. Trudeau had had a AAA rating all the way, which I think the hon. member did not hear. He was a magnificently fiscally prudent chap in addition to all his other virtues. How else could he have been AAA all the way? Obviously Standard & Poor's thought he was doing okay.
The Conservatives left us this huge unimaginable $42 billion fiscal mess in 1993, and we lost our credit rating of AAA. We were downgraded by Standard & Poor's but we got to work. We took the tough decisions under Mr. Chrétien and the member for LaSalle—Émard. After getting a credit downgrade because of Conservative fiscal irresponsibility, we could not get our good rating back right away. It took until 2002, 10 years after the Conservative downgrade, before Canada finally got back its AAA rating, thanks to the Liberals successfully cleaning up the Tory mess.
My concern is that this Tory pattern, although I should not say Tory, this Alliance, neo-conservative, Conservative pattern of creating fiscal messes might be about to repeat itself. We had the Mulroney fiscal mess in 1993 of $42 billion. We had the fiscal mess of the current finance minister and his provincial colleagues in 2003, having claimed they were running a balanced budget. I am afraid that the fiscal accounting trickery that he learned during his time at Queen's Park might be about to be imported to Ottawa in the lead-up to the budget. I will not go further into that, but certainly the Conservative pattern is to run huge deficits.
I remember Mr. Pearson saying that John Diefenbaker, and we can go back that far, had run seven consecutive deficits. Diefenbaker was a Conservative. Before that it had been surpluses all the way under the Liberals. It is the fate of Liberals to inherit Conservative fiscal messes. We saw it under John Diefenbaker. We saw it under Brian Mulroney. We saw it under Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.
Look south of the border. We saw it under Ronald Reagan. He ran huge deficits. Remember: voodoo economics, Reagan economics, tax cuts paid for themselves. That had to be cleaned up by the Democrats. Look at the United States today under George Bush. Hon. members laugh but if they just look at the facts, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, ran--