Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague form Louis-Saint-Laurent for his question.
I want to respond to what he said about refugees, because it is also important. It is an excellent example. The NDP was the first to talk about the need to welcome between 10,000 and 15,000 government-sponsored refugees. The Liberals promised to welcome 25,000. We regarded that as a bit of one-upmanship during the election campaign. They are claiming that they kept their promise in that regard, but I would remind the House that they said those 25,000 refugees would be government sponsored. We are now dealing with 25,000 privately sponsored refugees. This means they did not keep their promise, but at least we are helping refugees, which is good. The fact is, their commitments were unrealistic from the beginning.
I am an economist by training. I realize that a deficit can be a good thing. It all depends how the deficit is used. There is no denying that one of the Liberal Party election promises was to have a $10-billion deficit the first year, an $8-billion deficit the second year, and a $5-billion deficit the third year; in the fourth year, we would magically have a balanced budget.
We asked repeatedly during the election campaign how the Liberals were going to balance the budget, but we never got an answer. Now we are in a completely different situation, because now we have no idea when we will return to a balanced budget. The government seems to be improvising on this issue, which is extremely unfortunate.