Mr. Speaker, I listened with a great deal of interest to my Liberal colleague's speech. However, I would still like to say that I find the Liberals have drifted away from what liberalism and the philosophy of liberalism are advocating in this government. I will explain.
This government has made cuts, it had to, everyone agrees. Everyone elected to this House realizes and understands that the size of government has to be reduced. We have an accumulated deficit of $600 billion. It is so large that it is difficult to calculate.
In the past, the philosophy of the Liberal Party was always to redistribute the wealth. This was where its strength lay and what in fact made the difference between our society and that of the United States. Here in Canada, we believed that the wealth should be redistributed.
Let us look at what this government has done since it came to power. What has it done? First of all, it has reformed unemployment insurance, now known as employment insurance, but this is really just semantics. It has reformed unemployment insurance to the detriment of the unemployed and of workers, who will now receive much less. They will now have to work many more hours to qualify for the insurance they are paying for, despite the fact there are surpluses in the fund. That is one thing the government has done.
Second, they have cut provincial government subsidies. The Minister of Finance has very cleverly offloaded the deficit on the provinces. That is what he has done. The provinces cannot do this because they are another level of government. The minister was clever, but he must be denounced. Less money for welfare, less money for families.
Finally, who pays? Low wage earners, the middle class, and the most defenceless are the ones who will pay and who always pay. We know that the philosophy of this big party which governs the country was to redistribute wealth. At the moment they have forgotten about that. It is far easier for them to tax the poor than to go looking for the money where it really is, so that is what they do.
The government lacks courage. I see them looking into their book and not saying much. They know I am telling the truth. It is a government lacking in courage. They have made cuts, and everyone agrees that cuts had to be made, but they have not cut where they ought to have. They have cut back on the budgets for the poor, the low wage earners. I find that a great pity.
A program was announced in the red book-remember the red book?-about creating daycare centres. They have forgotten about that.
Before asking my question, I would like to speak of the infrastructure program. That was a good program, one of the few good ones, maybe the only one, they brought in. You will recall that this is a joint program with the provincial and municipal governments, so there are three levels working together, each one contributing a third.
In my riding, there is no money left. The question I am asking the hon. member is whether we ought not to bring back this program, as soon as possible, in order to create short term employment?
