Mr. Speaker, I would love to answer that. I think he walked right into that one.
The fact of the matter is that he is correct. The former Liberal government did slash that deficit, which was massive in its time. However, it did so on the backs of the provinces. The Liberals made cuts to health care. We still feel the reverberations today. They practically eliminated the military as we know it today.
They did manage to do those things. We, however, and I brought this out in my speech, managed to do it by lowering taxes. The member is absolutely correct; there were some strong years of growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In those years, there was a budget surplus. We took those moneys and applied them to the national debt to the tune of $39 billion so that when we were faced with the global incident we now know as the great recession, we were able to weather it much better.
I would agree that it is important to erase those deficits, but the right way to do it is to lower taxes and to manage properly.