Mr. Speaker, I know the hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood is very passionate about development. I do appreciate the pretense of his question, but his numbers are pretty bad, to be blunt.
I will refer back to a question posed to him by the hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George, which I do not think he quite answered earlier today. It was this. Why was the hon. member criticizing a doubling of aid from $2.5 billion in 2001? We have doubled it with our contribution of $364 million in this budget. We have doubled aid, the assistance that is going throughout the world. The former Liberal government cut it almost in half.
The Progressive Conservative government, previous to that Liberal government, had official development assistance, which we refer to as ODA, at the highest level in Canadian history. Not only did it balance its books on the backs of health transfers to provinces, social transfers to provinces, but the aid transfers to the rest of the world.
The world has stepped forward and recognized that we have doubled aid to the entire world. We beat our commitment to double aid to Africa. We are doing that in a credible manner, through targeted aid.
I see you want me to stop there, Mr. Speaker. I would love to continue talking about this, but thank you for the time.