Mr. Speaker, I would like to pick up on an answer from the previous speaker and put it to the parliamentary secretary. The previous speaker thought that the question of when the budget would be balanced was not a sensible question and that is was rightly ignored 400 times by the minister.
If this is not a legitimate question, that no government can tell when a budget will be balanced or unbalanced and it should not answer a question like that, why did the Liberals promise, on page 12 of their platform document in the last election, that they would “After the next two fiscal years, the deficit will decline and our investment plan will return Canada to a balanced budget in 2019.” Why did the Liberals run on that plan and does he agree with the previous speaker that it should not matter when the budget will be balanced?