Madam Speaker, I would start by directing the member to his own leader, the Prime Minister, who has actually said that we need to spend. It is he who said that we have to spend into deficit and that a deficit is now something that is needed and something that we are returning to for the first time since the mid-1990s.
The member talked about lessons in history. There are many reasons I got involved in politics, and the first election in which I was involved in a major way was the election in 1993. I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal which said that Canada was considered in the eyes of the Wall Street Journal to be an honorary member of the third world because of its unmanageable debt and deficit. At that point in time we were running a $43 billion a year deficit. We were at the bottom of the G-7 across almost every single economic indicator. The outlook for Canada could not have been more bleak. We were weaker against our peers than perhaps at any other time.
Yet we can look at the transformation we were able to undertake as a nation. In international circles it was called the Canadian miracle, to be able to go from that terrible spot we were left in the last time the Conservatives were in power to a position where we led the G-7 across almost every indicator, where our deficit was turned into the opportunity to pay down debt to the point where we were spending $3 billion each and every year less in interest, where we had a contingency fund, where we were properly managing the finances of the country.
That is the type of fiscal management that I expect. But what mattered most at that time was honesty. It was a finance minister who told us where our nation was, a finance minister who set targets year over year and met them.