Madam Speaker, throughout the debate, we heard a number of Conservatives talking about how they restored a balanced budget. However, they are forgetting to say how they managed to achieve that. The main reason is that they asked each and every department to cut its budget by between 5% and 10%. The member should know something about this, since he was a minister and he must have had to make cuts in his own department to come up with the money that Treasury Board was asking for.
I wonder if the member would at least acknowledge that the reason why they might have, possibly, balanced the budget in 2015-16—although the numbers suggest otherwise—was that it would have been done at the expense of services to Canadians and public services in general.