Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from the NDP wishes to hold me accountable for decisions of the Mulroney government. I was born in 1987. Respectfully, I know he is a bit older than me and he has been in this place for a long time, but I do not know that I am necessarily well positioned to defend all the decisions of the Mulroney government at that time.
I will say that, over the course of almost 150 years of this country's history, up until 2015, our national debt was at a certain point. Over the Harper years, that debt-to-GDP ratio went down overall. We went through the global financial crisis and we balanced the budget coming out of that. We lowered the debt-to-GDP ratio. However, when we compare the entire accumulated debt of this country, from Confederation to 2015, with the nine years under the NDP-Liberal government, more debt has been run up by one Prime Minister in nine years than every single prime minister before that.
We can debate the particulars of the Mulroney government's record and of the Diefenbaker government's record. We can talk about R.B. Bennett at some point as well. The fact is that, in comparing all of those prime ministers of the past, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister has run up more debt than all of them combined.