Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding that the comments made by the member for Regina—Lewvan a few moments ago about what I said are completely inaccurate, I would like to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with the member for Whitby. I am very much looking forward to listening to his speech.
I have spent quite a bit of time in the chamber today, so I have had the opportunity to listen to what has been said. I must say that some of the stuff I have been hearing from the Conservatives is quite alarming and hypocritical and, quite frankly, does not make a lot of sense when we look at their actions.
I will start with what we heard recently from the member for Lethbridge, the member for Barrie South—Innisfil and the member for Huron—Bruce earlier. They all talked about inflationary spending. They suggested the government created the inflationary problem that the whole world has seen. The Government of Canada spent money and then the whole world saw inflation. That is what Conservatives would like us to believe.
What I find most ironic about that comment is that I am sure the member for Regina—Lewvan, who was talking about me a few moments ago, and all members who have made comments are aware that they ran on a platform that had 106 billion dollars' worth of new spending in it. Are they now trying to say, indirectly, that their own platform was inflationary and was contributing to inflation? If I listen to what they are saying now, that is exactly what I am hearing.
It is more than that. I have been in this House long enough to have heard countless speeches, as I am sure the member for Whitby has, from Conservatives who get up and say the carbon tax has contributed to inflation and the carbon tax is the reason food prices are higher right now. Over and over again, we have heard that. Let us just throw out the fact that Ukraine produces a third of the world's wheat and is in the middle of a war and that extracting all of that wheat from the global supply has a massive impact on inflation. Let us forget about all of that. It was the carbon tax. The Conservatives said that all we had to do was get rid of the carbon tax, and then suddenly inflation would disappear.
Well, guess what. The carbon tax is gone. Have all the prices the Conservatives said would drop instantly dropped? No, they have not, because it was not contributing to inflation. This is the exact same logic they are trying to apply now.
Earlier, I got a real kick out of the member for Calgary Crowfoot talking about how the Conservatives are great fiscal stewards of the economy and the finances of the government and had left the new Liberal government in 2015 with an incredible surplus. It is as if he was trying to suggest that Conservatives know something about bringing in balanced budgets. They know absolutely nothing about it.
Let us go back. I will just talk about the preceding two Conservative governments. Brian Mulroney had 10 budgets, and he balanced zero. There were zero balanced budgets by Brian Mulroney. I understand that probably very few members of the Conservative Party were here when Brian Mulroney was here. There is at least one currently in the House right now, and that is great, but I will make this a little more relevant for some of the newer members who may have been here when Stephen Harper was here.
It is true that Stephen Harper had three surpluses out of the nine budgets he introduced in this House. Let us look at those budgets. The first two budgets were at the beginning of Stephen Harper's term, when he was first elected. He had a $13-billion surplus, but what is interesting is that the year before that, Paul Martin also had a $13-billion surplus. Stephen Harper actually inherited, from Paul Martin, a $13-billion surplus.
Then in year two of Harper's government, he had a $9-billion surplus. It was on its way down. Then it vanished, and he was in a deficit position all the way through, right up until the last year when the Canadian Taxpayers Federation or some right-wing association told him it was absolutely imperative that he balance the budget. What did Stephen Harper do? He set out to balance the budget.
How did he do that? He did it by selling shares of GM at bargain prices. He slashed veterans' offices. For the first time in recorded Canadian history, our percentage of GDP invested in the military dropped below 1%. It has only ever existed below 1% for one year. That was in the year 2015, when it was at 0.96% of GDP. That is the legacy. That is the surplus. When the member for Calgary Crowfoot comes in here and says that the Conservatives left a surplus, I guess they did, but they did it on the backs of Canadians.