Madam Speaker, before answering my colleague's question, I would like to repeat what my colleague for Québec said earlier about programs cutting subsidies and causing downstream resources to disappear.
In the area of social development and human resources development, we used to have a program called SCPI. That program ended its cash investments and developed extremely strict eligibility criteria for financing. Several social economy enterprises received funds from SCPI to help the homeless and the poor. Right now, they must lay off people because they cannot satisfy the main criterion which is to become autonomous. How can an enterprise become autonomous when the people it serves do not have a single penny in their pockets? That is nonsense.
The Coopérative de soutien à domicile that I mentioned earlier is a social economy enterprise, and there are a number of them in Quebec; they help people. There also are cooperatives or social economy enterprises that do other work, such as recycling clothing and other items, and that put them back to society by putting them on sale in their stores. These enterprises are essential and, at the same time, it is unfortunate that they are essential, because we should have been able to find solutions with the means that we have. When we say that we have billions of dollars in surplus every year, we should have been able to find the means to serve these people in an honourable way. What makes me angriest is that the government is giving a handout to seniors—$19 more a month in January—who receive the guaranteed income supplement. It will be $38 a month in January 2007 as part of the guaranteed income supplement. This hurts me and I am ashamed for our leaders who make the decisions on this, who put this in the budget.
It is awful that we are doing this to people who did everything to build today's society. It is as if we are warehousing them in institutions and leaving them to die. We are not giving them the means to live with dignity. The only enterprises that can help them a little are social economy enterprises. However, they must be funded adequately. They must have the ability to grow appropriately. To this end, we must have special funds that will go to the provinces and that will then be distributed to social economy enterprises. I have little hope in this regard, because we know well the centralizing will of this government. However, I find it very unfortunate.