Our friends that we have invited here this morning could perhaps tell us if we have understood correctly. It is a question of financial means; each province, as well as Toronto, obviously, has the will to develop child care centres under the initiatives that have been taken.
However, the conservatives are now saying that it is a matter of societal choices and, as Mr. Chong stated, the development of child care centres is not their choice. Their choice is the development of military equipment. They want a debate on child care funding, whereas there was no such debate last year with regard to the 17.5 billion dollars for military equipment. This is a decision that was made outside of Parliament. It was submitted to no committee and those people did not say a single word with a view to understanding what had taken place. Today, now that we are talking about children, they are trying to place the burden on those who wish to develop these programs. This is shameful! This is quite worrisome as a societal choice.
This must be stated here because this is part of the debate that we are having. Since this morning, the message being relayed is that it is virtually embarrassing to want to develop child care centres, because we do not have the money for it, whereas we have tens of billions of dollars for arms. This is rather worrisome for society.