Madam, Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.
I understand where he is coming from because, during his election campaign, he had to focus on his platform and never read ours. We never said anything about austerity. We talked about balancing the budget for one very good reason that he forgot to mention, unfortunately: in the NDP's budget, our revenue column included new revenue sources that the Liberal government would never dare contemplate, such as getting big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.
Our plan was to raise taxes on big corporations by a few points, which would have covered the cost of our promises.