Mr. Speaker, when our government came to office in 2006, we repaid $38 billion in debt. It constituted the largest debt repayment in Canadian history. That is the record of the previous Conservative government.
My friend is quite right that the Conservative government did run some short-term deficits as a result of the need for short-term stimulus spending in the face of the worst economic recession this country has faced in more than 50 years. However, the spending was short term and targeted so that by 2015, when we passed the torch to the current government, we handed it a surplus of $1 billion. That is the difference. Now we see a government that is running billions of dollars of deficits and we are not even officially in a recession.