Madam Speaker, it is an honour to follow the hon. member for Abbotsford. Let me take a moment to salute his record as the former minister of international trade. We look forward to future collaboration with him.
Why are we here? I would rather not focus my closing remarks as they were on this day in Parliament on actual numbers but rather ask what the cost is. I am willing to grant that the previous government did its best to spend as little as possible, but that is not necessarily a good thing, particularly because it did leave us in debt anyway because it failed to balance a single budget between 2008 and 2014, but more importantly, because of the costs that this had in Canada over that period of time. Let us not forget that.
Over the past 10 years our economy has been characterized by fundamentally weak growth. Perhaps some of the gains that the hon. member for Abbotsford made acting as minister of international trade in negotiating trade agreements, which our government believes were generally good, could have been better. Had we developed our manufacturing sector, had we put money into innovation, had we put money into becoming a stronger and more diversified economy, then perhaps we would have been able to profit from those agreements much more than we have. We have done the opposite. We effectively cut infrastructure spending over that period of time in real terms and have ended up with an infrastructure deficit that cries out to be rectified. Cuts were also made to veterans affairs and social programs, including programs for social housing.
I spent the past 20 years teaching in one of the world's finest law faculties in one of Canada's finest universities. I could see the cuts to university research that the previous government undertook and the devastating impact that had on research programs in pure science, applied science, and the social sciences. That was one of the reasons I decided to put myself on leave from that tenured position in order to go into direct public service: to rectify what I saw as an incredible problem in policy that the previous government chose to follow.
Not only did the previous government cut university research for the sake of balancing budgets, but it destroyed archives, weakened research and development in this country, and put our innovation agenda way behind other countries, including countries like Scandinavia for example.
Yes, it is fine to talk about budgetary numbers, but let us not forget the costs. When it is time to reinvest in an economy, reinvest in infrastructure, reinvest in Canada's people as it is now, a government needs the courage to do it.