Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague who serves on the public accounts committee with me for his hard work there and the great speech he gave today.
There have been a number of questions referencing 2008. The member before him spoke about the hon. Jim Flaherty and how, in the first two years our government was in power, we paid down $38 billion with surpluses. We balanced the budget, we had a surplus, and we paid down over $38 billion in national debt.
In 2008, the largest recession since the Great Depression hit, yes, we did go into deficit spending with infrastructure funding and investing in things that would help create jobs. Canada was the last to enter the recession and the first to come out of it. This showed that it was good fiscal management.
We had balanced budget legislation, which said that if we were not in recession, if the economy was growing, we would have balanced budgets. The current government has thrown that out and has gone from $10 billion to $20 billion to $30 billion in projected deficits—