Mr. Speaker, I welcome the parliamentary secretary to her new responsibilities.
The parliamentary secretary did not speak of the Conservative government's record of big borrow and spend government. She did not discuss the fact that her government increased spending by three times the rate of inflation and actually put Canada into deficit before the economic downturn. It burnt through a $13 billion surplus and put Canada into deficit before the downturn. She did not talk about the $1.2 billion that her government wasted on a three-day G20 conference, or the $16 billion that it wants to spend on untendered fighter jets, or the $13 billion it intends to spend on prisons.
The parliamentary secretary did not discuss her government's failure to present Canadians with a real plan, a credible plan, to eliminate the deficit and get us back into surplus, and that is what the International Monetary Fund and the Parliamentary Budget Officer have said. There is no real plan.
The member quoted a couple of folks during her speech. I would like to know if she agrees with the following quote from the chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, one of her own government economists, Philip Cross, regarding the impact of more tax cuts:
--is going to be relatively small, given the huge flow of money driven by other forces.
Also, I would like to know if she agrees with Don Martin who said:
How a government, which has emptied the public purse far into the future, ratcheted up the deficit to historic highs and bloated the bureaucracy to unprecedented size can stand for re-election as a conservative-friendly government is beyond me.
I would appreciate the member's response to both those quotations.