Mr. Speaker, being lectured by a Conservative about running debt is like being lectured by a pyromaniac about fire safety. The Conservatives have added $150 billion to the national debt, and 1.3 million Canadians are still out of work with the highest personal debt rate in our history.
I refer him to his own finance department's report. Every year, and it did it again this year, it looks at all the parties in this place to see which party most often balances the books over time, historically, and lo and behold, it is New Democrats who balance the books more than anybody else.
I will give the Conservatives some credit in that they beat the Liberals a little bit, but it is so ironic to hear Conservatives now lecturing everybody, after having just borrowed about $2.5 billion to pay for income splitting that helps 15% predominantly of the wealthiest Canadians, that they somehow think they are entitled to lecture anybody on managing the books.
The hard reality for the Conservatives is that we present a fully costed plan to Canadians for infrastructure, for child care, and when we say invest, we actually mean invest, that when we put the money in, we get some money back. In fact, in most cases like infrastructure and child care, we get more back into the Canadian economy as opposed to shipping it out the door like the Conservatives do, no strings attached, to businesses that do not end up reinvesting. How do we know that? The facts support it. There were 400,000 lost manufacturing jobs in places like Windsor, and the Conservatives have nothing to say for it and no plan to make things better.