Mr. Speaker, let us look at leadership and the types of things done under the previous government. The Liberals talk so much about deficits and the situation that occurred as though they were not around in 2008 and 2009, understanding the global economic disaster and realizing how well Canada was able to make it through that time.
The Liberals talked about all the extra dollars that were spent. The NDP and the Liberals said that we should have spent even more by adding dollars to various programs. Fortunately, we did not pay attention to them. That would not have allowed us to get to the stage where we could have removed the deficit.
There were deficits in the past few years associated with that. The reason was that we were respecting contracts we had with individuals. There could have been other ways of dealing with deficits, as was done in the 1990s, as I heard in some conversations this morning.
Having been a hospital board chairman at the time and understanding what the Liberals had done in cutting dollars to health care transfers and transfers to the provinces, it was important to have someone who understood the economics that was associated with it. We had a prime minister who understood economics and knew what all those binders from each of the departments meant versus simply recognizing the different colours, which is the Prime Minister we have now.