Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for identifying exactly the balance our government is trying to set. It would be much easier for a government to impose cuts in the way the Liberal Party did in the mid-1990s by simply slashing National Defence and slashing transfers to our provincial partners.
The government has tried to stay on a pragmatic course, and I direct the hon. member to this course, which set 2015 as a goal for balanced budgets, but along the way make strategic investments in infrastructure and in skills training as a way of softening the impact of the global economic downturn on Canada. The results speak for themselves with Canada's leadership of the G8.