Mr. Speaker, I have heard a similar speech from the member many times before, and I find it very troubling particularly when he talks about getting a handle on spending.
How does he justify that Stephen Harper ran up the debt up by $160 billion? I know his response, because we hear it a lot from those on the other side of the House. They say it was the economic times and the circumstances, and that they needed to come back out of the 2008 recession.
However, in reality, if we were to go back over the last 151 years, we would see that Conservatives have been in power for 36% of the time but have racked up well over 55% of the debt. In fact, of the last 19 budgets introduced by Conservatives in the House, 16 of them ran deficits, occurring under Mulroney and Harper. The only three that ran surpluses were the two that came after Paul Martin's $13-billion surplus and the one in 2015, after Conservatives slashed veterans services and sold off shares of GM at bargain prices so that they could produce a budget to bring into the election.
How can the member opposite square off that argument about Stephen Harper's record?