Mr. Speaker, I would like to address a few things that have been said by the member opposite both now and previously. We have been throwing out numbers on the debt, which the member disagreed on, one being $1.2 trillion and one being $1.4 trillion, but it is done in isolation without looking at the percentage to GDP and without looking at what is happening in the rest of the world. We can shock and scare people with those tactics, but I do not think it is constructive.
If we were to look at Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio and our credit rating from Standard & Poor's and Moody's, both of which I feel have a better grasp on economics than perhaps members in this House, we would see that Canada still has a AAA rating and that our debt-to-GDP ratio is around 85%, about the same as Great Britain, but there are 25-plus countries with a greater debt-to-GDP ratio, including Japan, France, the U.S.A., Singapore and many others that have actually increased spending, as we did, to ensure that the debt citizens could not afford to take on and that all economists across the world knew we were going to incur during the COVID pandemic was taken on by the government.
Could the member please explain why he keeps throwing out these scary numbers without putting them into context and without talking about the global situation?