Mr. Speaker, I listened to my friend's speech with some interest. I have to take one strong exception with something that he said, which was that the Liberals spent, I think it was $250 million over a certain period of time. That is exactly what the Conservatives are doing. There is something quite different about what the Liberals did, which is that they handed a bunch of that ad money to friends, in the sponsorship scandal. I hope that is not exactly what the Conservatives are doing. They are running many millions of dollars in self-promoting ads, much like the Liberals did, and when the Conservatives were in opposition they said that was terrible, that it was an awful waste of taxpayer money.
The member said that these ads need to be effective, yet through access to information, we have seen that the government's own assessment of these ads is that they are not effective and do not prove their worth and money. That is from his own department's assessment.
My specific question is this. For the last 17 months, the economy has had less than a 1% job growth, which is the worst record outside of a recession since we started taking statistics on this. It has been four decades since we have had such a poor performance in creating jobs. Why is there so little in the ads, and anything else that the Conservatives are doing, including their budget? The answer is the elephant in the room, which is that under their watch the Conservatives are not helping the economy to grow as it ought to.