Mr. Speaker, the member made the same error that previous Liberals made when she tried to attribute the debt and the deficit to the Conservatives. First, I will state my credentials. I am a math type guy. One of the things I learned was some math and finance. It is a very elementary computation, which we have all heard, called compound interest.
Let us take the debt in 1984, which the Conservatives inherited from what the Liberals had done in the previous 14 years, from 1970 onward, and set it aside. When the Conservatives were defeated and the Liberals took over in 1993, that debt, by plain, simple compound interest, would have grown to the amount that it was in 1993. I do not know those numbers in my head right now, but I remember having computed it because I was challenged on that fact. It turns out that at the going interest rate, this is exactly what happened.
The debt we still have is the heritage of those years under Trudeau. When Mr. Jean Chrétien was the minister of finance, he had record breaking deficits. That is what drove us into debt in the first place, and we are still suffering from it all these years later.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, put some measures into place to try to address that. When the Liberals came back to power in 1993, those measures were in place and they were able to address the issue, and we were very glad they did. In the Liberal way, they could have found new ways to squander the money again. We are glad they did not.