Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.
Thank you all very much for coming today on such short notice and for giving up your suppertime on a Friday night. That's really appreciated.
You've heard apologies before. I'd like to add my own. I apologize on behalf of past governments, although I wasn't part of them. I apologize on behalf of present governments, although I'm a little marginalized in them. And I apologize particularly on behalf of men, who have not done an adequate job to help solve these problems.
I don't think most men or most of the white community are uncaring about this, and I don't think that most of us are racists, but unfortunately the opposite of helping is not usually overt discrimination, it's lack of action. And unfortunately, the opposite of love is not hatred, it's indifference, and we've been far too indifferent for far too long. And I include myself to some extent in that.
It's clear to me what some of the problems are here. You've talked about some of them: the huge poverty gap, education, educating the public, but also educating women so they can crawl out of poverty. One problem is changing attitudes, but a big one is funding. I have what I call Bruce Hyer's rule of funding, and that is that vision.... And I think all of us share a vision of a Canada in which neither women nor their children are hungry or discriminated against, and in which they feel secure and happy and look forward to equal opportunity. But vision without funding is hallucination. And we're just not funding these programs. It's so clear.
Ms. Harvard said not only do we have $10 million worth of funding, but it's going to the wrong places. Well, $10 million for the kinds of problems we have here--these endemic problems of racism and discrimination against women in Canada--is a bad joke. We're spending $5 billion to $6 billion a year in Afghanistan, allegedly to help women in Afghanistan, and we're spending $10 million to help women in Canada? We're spending $17 billion for jet fighter planes to protect us from what I'm not quite sure, when our real problems are internal, not external. We're spending $60 billion on tax cuts to our largest and most profitable corporations in Canada, and we don't have a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to help women? That's worse than criminal.
So this is my quick question, and I can follow up later, and please follow up with me later. Could each of you—Ms. Pierre and Ms. Harvard and Ms. Simard--give me one answer?
I'm a man. I'm white. I'm privileged. I'm a successful business person. I'm lucky. I'm very lucky, and my family is very lucky. It's not my file in Parliament. I have six other critic areas, and Jean Crowder of the NDP, the aboriginal critic, and Irene Mathyssen, the women's critic, do a great job. But despite that, how can I help as a person? How can I help as a man? How can I help as a white person who cares? And particularly, how can I help as an MP to help my people and my caucus and my government? Can you boil down to one or two bullet points how I, wearing all of those hats, can be most helpful?