Madam Speaker, if the member opposite wants to go back to 1993, she is missing everything that happened before 1993, going back to 1984, when the Conservatives took over after Liberal governments on and off from 1968.
I actually ran in the election in 1974, so I am very familiar with these issues.
Canada did not have significant debt—that is, a debt that was anywhere near out of control—until 1968, when Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada, and he did not even take debt seriously. In fact, Pierre Trudeau told Canadians that debt does not matter because it is money that we owe to ourselves. That is when Canada's big deficits and big debt began.
When the Conservatives took over government in 1994, Canada's national debt was like the big snowball we see in the cartoons, going down a ski slope and getting bigger and bigger. When it was getting near the bottom was when the Conservatives became the government.
The interest rates, the interest costs on debt, were eating up a huge portion of the government's budget. It was a huge task to try to get that balanced. It takes years to show benefits.
In fact, the Conservative government at the time made the toughest decision. It was to introduce a value-added tax, the GST, which the member's party promised to get rid of and did not, because that value-added tax paid down the deficit. The Liberal Party of Canada took credit for that for years afterward.