Mr. Speaker, the hon. member asks why we would not want to see the government run a deficit. First of all, it is not exactly the same thing. There was a global financial crisis, and leaders around the world took measures to coordinate their approaches at a fiscal level to ensure that, as a world, we were able to pull forward. Canada took a leadership role in that, along with other countries. New Democrats, who were in the House during that time, demanded more spending all the time, as they do almost every day in the House of Commons.
Why is it that we do not want to go down that road today? It is because we saw what happened with Liberal governments in the past. We saw the devastating cuts that they had to make to health care and post-secondary education, and they threw them on the backs of the provinces. Provinces like Ontario and Alberta and others had to respond to that because suddenly the transfers were turned off.
As a government, we were able to get our budget back to balance coming out of the global crisis. We were able to do that while dramatically increasing investments at the same time in transfers for health care, social services, and education, as the member for York—Simcoe so aptly mentioned in his comments. That is important.
As we move forward as a country, and if we are going to avoid the types of decisions that a previous Liberal government had to make and governments around the world have to make in terms of cutting really important services for their voters, balanced budgets are critical. We hope that NDP members will support this important motion.