Mr. Speaker, I did not think I criticized the Conservatives about the recession, had I? Therefore, I do not know quite what the member is talking about.
However, I would point out that while I appreciate the compliment of leading the nation's finances 13 years ago, I was not even elected to this Parliament 13 years ago, but I thank the member anyway.
I will take this opportunity very briefly to correct the typical propaganda and weasel words coming from the government. Every economist on the planet measures a country's growth by gross domestic product, GDP. It is a fact that in the last six months Canada's growth measured by GDP did worse than every other country in the G7 except one, the UK, the second worst.
The government did not like to sell that picture to Canadians so it invented some other measure called domestic demand, some arcane thing that no one else uses. Lo and behold, Canada looked better when measured by domestic demand, whatever that is, over the past six months. The government is trying to fool Canadians because the only measure is GDP on which we are second to last. Therefore, it picked some garbage arcane measure instead on which we do better, but nobody will believe this nonsense.