Madam Speaker, I appreciate my hon. colleague's thoughts on the budget, but I have a couple of points of concern.
I would ask the member to reconcile his comments on the deficit with the fact that the previous Harper government ran a total debt of $150 billion over the period that the Conservatives were there, completely erasing the debt that was paid down during the Martin era. The Conservatives had the largest deficit in Canadian history. They ran deficits six years in a row and during that same period of time had absolutely anemic growth, the worst growth the country had seen in a generation, running at near zero per cent, at the back of the pack of the G7 countries.
Contrast that with where we are today, where we had campaigned on utilizing deficits to drive growth, job creation, and wealth for the middle class, where we have now moved to the top of the pack of the G8 nations in terms of job creation and growth, where we have left behind that period of anemic dead growth and are now driving forward with an economy that is working, creating more than 600,000 jobs.
How can the member reconcile his comments against a deficit when his party reigned supreme in the creation of deficits during its tenure on this side of the House?