Mr. Speaker, I would not want to interrupt the hon. member's happy little litany of apparent accomplishments, which are not accomplishments in and of themselves.
He neglects to mention that under his government's watch it has run a $13 billion surplus into a $60 billion deficit,which will cumulatively over the next five years go up to $165 billion, all because the government cannot control its own spending, in part because the government has an inability to constrain its spending beyond twice the rate of inflation on an annual basis, which cumulatively over a number of years has resulted in an extraordinary deficit where there was no deficit that was necessary.
The member also neglects to mention that the most significant reason that the banking system is in such good shape is because of the good efforts of the previous government that denied the desire on the part of the banks to merge.
We can only imagine that had the Liberal government of the day consented to the merger, as the banks aspired to do, the Canadian taxpayer would have ended up on the hook for literally billions of dollars as bailouts likely would have been necessary because the banks in a merged state would have wanted to acquire other banks and those banks would not have been the most successful assets in the world.
Does the member, in his excessive litany, think that possibly his government inherited a tremendous fiscal, monetary and banking foundation on which the government has not totally destroyed?