Mr. Speaker, it is not one of my pastimes, but maybe my hon. friend will be interested in enlightening or educating me.
In any event, the reason we broke and had a throne speech is that it is actually a pretty normal thing to do. We had worked pretty hard, and there were only a few substantive bills left on the Order Paper. We have done a tremendous job in getting through our work, so it was a natural time for it, as happens in many parliaments. In fact, there have been well over 100 prorogations since Confederation, and it is a normal pacing to do that to allow for a refocus of the agenda. We have done that. We have seen it. It ensures that our focus on job creation and economic growth remains. It also ensures that we are looking out for ordinary Canadians with an agenda to help consumers, from unbundling TV channels that are offered to cable subscribers to tackling unfair roaming rates.
All of these things reflect what Canadians want. They are the product of our discussions. At the same time, there is a very important commitment to balance the budget in 2015, and on top of that, to bring in reasonable balanced-budget legislation. It would not be a straitjacket type of legislation but rather legislation that would ensure that when a government does respond to a crisis, which it needs to be able to do economically, it would then place a priority, after the fact, on getting the budget back into balance, paying down the debt, and getting the deficit reduced. It would be much as our Minister of Finance has done in ensuring not only that Canada has done well recovering from the 2008 economic downturn but that our deficit has already been more than cut in half.
As was said in the throne speech, the Minister of Finance is on track to deliver that balanced budget in 2015 to ensure that Canada maintains the strongest fiscal position of any of the major developed economies, something that we have enjoyed throughout this time, thanks to the leadership of the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister. These are all things that were reflected in our throne speech. They are things that he may regard as a failure but are things that we on this side of the House regard as the successes that are most important to Canadians.