Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for the excellent question.
I want to say to the folks back home, “Get used to it. This is what it is going to look like in 2015 when we have finally gotten rid of the Conservatives. They have abandoned the field to discussion.”
The Conservatives cannot get up and make misrepresentations, so they really do not know what else to talk about. We could be talking about, I suppose, flying limousines for the Prime Minister, hanging out at the Taj Mahal. We could talk about their priorities of taking $50 million in border infrastructure money and blowing it in a slush fund. That is their idea of priorities.
We could talk about the F-35. Well, we are not supposed to talk about the F-35 because they are not sure if it is the F-35 anymore. They were going to have a $10 billion overrun on 65 planes, and then they were going to try to keep it from the Canadian people.
Meanwhile the Conservatives are not interested in the real priorities, for example, getting the transfers for home care for seniors. The hon. Jack Layton, before he died, in the election of 2011, made his one commitment to seniors, that we would pass a bill to get every senior in this country out of poverty. The cost was $700 million. That might seem like a lot, but that is probably not even the cost of replacing the engine in one of the F-35s, because I hear they are not coming with engines.
It is a question of choices. This is what politics is about. It is a question of choices. We have a government that uses its choices again and again to blow money on its friends, to give breaks, to misrepresent facts, to use its time in the House of Commons, not to discuss important issues but to try to misrepresent and fool the Canadian people.
The New Democratic Party has been talking about these issues consistently and coherently. Canadians know that when we are talking about the issues of senior citizens, it is not just that we are going to bring in a mandatory minimum sentence and change the Criminal Code.
We have to have a coherent vision to ensure that, not only can we address criminalization against seniors and their victimization, but that we will have a strategy for fraud that is proactive. We will have a strategy for home care. We will actually have the transfers to the provinces, to ensure the Canadian health system remains something that we can all be proud of, and that it does not continue to deteriorate, as has happened all too often across this country.
