Madam Speaker, the hon. member touched on a lot of different aspects, but I will focus on the one related to deficit spending. I agree with what the Minister of Finance has said. The appropriate metric for measuring Canada's progress on reducing debt is the debt-to-GDP ratio. We see that it is going down now. It has gone down each year under our government's tenure, and it will continue to do so.
When we focus merely on deficit without looking at the overall growth of the economy, we are seeing the trees and failing to see the forest. We need to see the overall economic growth that Canada has enjoyed over the first two years of the government's mandate, which has greatly surpassed expectations and provided for additional economic growth that renders the deficit spending less than the overall growth of the economy, so that we see an overall reduction. Therefore, Canada's fiscal position is stronger under our government. Even though there are modest deficits being run, they are less than the overall growth of the economy. This is more than the previous government can say, because it grew the debt-to-GDP ratio over its tenure, and we have reduced it.