Madam Speaker, I would love to answer that question.
What we see in this House during question period every day is the Conservative government giving misinformation, more misinformation and more misinformation when ministers respond to questions. It seems that they misinform the public three or four times in the hope that the misinformation will become the truth. Well, it will not.
The fact of the matter is when we took over government, we were facing a $42 billion annual deficit which was left to us by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
If the hon. member wants to talk about the provinces, then let us talk about the provinces. The man who currently sits in the finance minister's chair, who is now driving this country into deficit, did the same when he was minister of finance in Ontario. Now for the province of Ontario, yes, it is going into deficit again, but the mess that was left because of that Minister of Finance right there in terms of managing the affairs of the province of Ontario drove the province pretty near into bankruptcy. It is too bad. One would think the current Minister of Finance would have learned a lesson from his mistakes in Ontario, but now he is trying to impose the same pain on all of Canada.
The other point I would make is that when the Liberal Party was in power, Canada was the envy of the industrialized world in terms of its fiscal capacity and in terms of the management of its financial affairs.
The biggest joke that I see on the international scene these days is the Prime Minister parading around the world talking about our wonderful banks, how good it is that they have been regulated and that they are in much better shape than anywhere else. That Prime Minister, when he was in the opposition, opposed that move. I sat in the committee that was looking at those banks and it was during a Liberal government. We convinced the then finance minister, Paul Martin, that we should not go the way others have gone in allowing foreign ownership and deregulation of the banks. The current Prime Minister opposed that move.
It is thanks to the former Liberal government that we have the banking system that we do in this country, thank you very much.