Mr. Speaker, my colleague brought up the concept of the WITB, the working income tax benefit, which of course was introduced by our former Conservative government and our former minister of finance, the Hon. Jim Flaherty. It gives me a great opportunity to talk about the record of Jim Flaherty, a man who, during the early years when we were in a strong economic position, paid off $40 billion of the national debt. He did that so that when we entered the global economic recession of 2008-09 we had the fiscal capacity, the financial room, to invest in key infrastructure projects that benefited the Canadian economy. It is because of the leadership of people like Jim Flaherty that we were able to come out of that recession stronger.
Now, in a time when the economy is growing, we have deficits. We have large deficits, meaning that if we were to enter another economic recession, we would not have the fiscal space or capacity to respond as we did in 2008-09 because of the strong leadership of Jim Flaherty.