Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Charlottetown very much for that insightful question. It happens the two of us were both elected in the year 2000 and have been good colleagues and friends since then, but it does seem to be the fate of the Liberals that every once in a while we are called upon to inherit a big, fat, juicy, ugly Conservative deficit, and Canadians ask us to clean up the mess.
I would agree with my colleague that that is indeed what happened in 1993. There was a record $42 billion fat Conservative deficit which we inherited. At that time we were the laughing stock of the G7. We were the worst. We were about to become a third world country and have the IMF come in.
However, what did we do? We cleaned it up and we brought that debt down from the worst to the best. Then these Conservatives came in and they inherited the best debt situation in the whole of the G7 by a country mile. They squandered that surplus before the recession hit. They turned it into a deficit. Now once again, we have a record Canadian, ugly, Conservative deficit, this time of $56 billion. I suspect we, at some point, will be called in to clean up this second Conservative mess.