First, my apologies for my inability to speak to you in French.
I'm not even sure where to start. Sometimes I feel like I've fallen down the rabbit hole, because suddenly we're in a position where we have income supplement programs that benefit those who need them least, and we are calling them something different than they are. We're calling this child care, when in fact it has nothing to do with child care. It's not unlike the national child benefit that's currently in place. If we want to compare income programs with income programs, then we could talk about those two programs together.
So in answering your question, I would certainly suggest that an income program like the national child benefit, or like the proposal the Bloc introduced as an alternative, certainly makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to most Canadians. I'm not sure there are very many people in the country who would agree that a greater income benefit should go to parents with the least need. It does, of course, seem very backward to me.
But the point I really wanted to make is that while income supports are an important part of a family support policy, overall this is not child care, and it can't be seen as replacing child care. We hear this government comparing numbers and saying they're spending twice as much on child care; no, they're spending some more on income supports, and that's important. They're actually cutting investment in child care by $1 billion or $1.2 billion a year.
Of course, we at the CCAAC look to Quebec as an international leader in child care, and we would hope that the Government of Canada would follow that model in the start that it has made.