Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back, good to see you back in the chair, and good to see all of my colleagues here as well. I have limited time before we have to adjourn this debate so I will make my comments as brief as possible.
However, I have to at the outset correct the record again for my colleague, my friend from Cape Breton—Canso, who tried to imply that during the time of the previous government we recklessly ran up deficits and added to the national debt indiscriminately. Of course that is not true. We did so for one very good reason. We did it grudgingly but it was necessary to spend money, particularly on infrastructure projects, during the time of the worldwide global recession.
Every country in the G20 agreed to that plan. We did so grudgingly, as I mentioned, but the one thing that stays with me, and my colleague and my friend who was opposite at the time would have to agree to this, is this. As we were preparing our budgets and as we were preparing to spend $50 billion or $60 billion on infrastructure projects to try to stimulate the economy, the complaints the member opposite and his colleagues in the Liberal benches had were that we were not spending enough. They and their colleagues in the NDP were on record day after day saying that we had to spend more. Now, the Liberals have the audacity to stand in their place and complain about the debt. This is typical Liberal hypocrisy. It is doublespeak. The Liberals have always in their terms of office spent first and tried to correct the record later. That is simply not the way we have done things when we were in government.
What is even more troubling to me is the fact that the Liberal government, beyond trying to be a revisionist history party, is reversing many of the initiatives we brought forward that are so incredibly popular and beneficial to Canadians.
I take for an example the TFSA. The tax-free savings account is the most important tax-saving initiative that we have seen in the country since the advent of the RRSP. It allowed Canadians to put after-tax money into an account where that money could accumulate tax free and then to withdraw the money tax free. It was unbelievably popular with Canadians. We had at the outset $5,000 as a limit that Canadians could contribute to this account. We later increased that to $10,000 and then to $10,500. However, when the Liberals came to power, they said they would roll back the contribution limits to $5,000. Their rationale was that the ordinary Canadian could not afford to put $10,000 a year into an account so they ratcheted it back.
I just have one question. When has it become a bad thing to allow Canadians to save more money tax free? When has that become a bad thing? Apparently it has because the government says it is. Tens of millions of Canadians have maxed out on their TFSA contributions each and every year. Tens of millions more were looking forward to putting more money into a TFSA so they could withdraw the money when they wanted, to spend it on what they wished.
However, the government of course knows better than Canadians. The Liberals said sorry, that people could not put that money into a tax-free savings account because they wanted it to spend it. That is the tax-and-spend philosophy of the Liberals and it is something that most Canadians eventually, and hopefully sooner rather than later, will come to understand and realize once again that there is only one party in this place that truly protects the interests of the taxpayers, and that is the Conservative Party of Canada.