OTTAWA - Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is Canada's sixth longest serving finance minister and if you measure his time on the job by looking at the country's balance sheet, you would hardly think he came into it as a fiscally conservative deficit-hating hawk.
Five of his seven budgets featured outsize deficits, the national debt has grown by more than $100 billion and federal program spending has jumped 37% while revenues have grown only 10%.
And yet, he has no regrets on those scores.
"Not at all, because I know what actually has happened which is for the first two years we paid down about $38 billion of public debt which was our plan," Flaherty said in a year-end interview with Sun News Network.
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