Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, I know the member was eager to bring Trump into this debate somehow, but I would encourage him to put aside the election talking points and actually engage in the discussion. I never said that one should not ever run deficits. I said specifically, in fact, that during times of national crisis, of major economic downturns, it is perfectly sensible to run stimulative deficits.
Let us be clear. What the member said about running deficits every single year under Stephen Harper is objectively false. I have never heard Liberal members even claim that in the early years, prior to the economic downturn, there was a deficit. Surely the member is mistaken in thinking that in the 2006-07 and 2007-08 fiscal years there were deficits. That was obviously not the case. At the end, again, the Parliamentary Budget Officer was clear that the budget was balanced. Debt was paid down prior to the financial crisis, and always during the financial crisis it was his party that was asking for more to be spent.
Let us talk as well, because the member did, about the Liberal policies of the 1990s. The Liberal policies of the 1990s were clearly an example of what happens when they have big deficits that have been run and they reach a point where they just cannot keep digging anymore. The pressure from the IMF on Canada and from other institutions forced a situation where there had to be a fiscal reckoning, and it was a painful fiscal reckoning. The government balanced budgets not by finding efficiencies at the federal level but by slashing transfers to the provinces. That is not how the previous Conservative government balanced the budget. We did not slash transfers to the provinces. Rather, we found efficiencies within the delivery of services federally and did so quite effectively, and we were able to deliver a balanced budget on schedule. We did that, again, without the massive slashing to provincial transfers.
The member, when he talks, should think about the lessons of the 1990s, because—