Thank you, Chair.
I've had have a habit of following Mr. Brown in questions. It's a treat. It's a little bit like following the elephants in the parade, but rather than stop and pick up all that stuff, let's just go around it and let's get serious about child care.
I want to give you a scenario that happened to me in the last election campaign. This is an issue that has galvanized child care workers and it's an issue that people feel very passionate about.
Conservative members don't like this bill. They didn't like the early learning and child care, and they feel passionately about it. I feel passionately that we should have some kind of framework for early learning and child care. I'd prefer that we actually had the money as well, that was allocated—it was certainly a good start—in the last Parliament.
The scenario I'm talking about was in the election campaign. Late in the campaign I had a call from a child care centre called The Growing Place in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. They called me up—and it was not political at all; I hadn't met the people who worked there. They asked me to come in.
They said they were very concerned about what was going to happen if the Conservative Party won the election. She said some of them had voted Conservative and some of them had voted Liberal and some of them had voted NDP, but that this issue was important to them because they felt so strongly.
Where I come from in Nova Scotia, I've talked before about the heroes of child care, such as Sue Wolstenholme, who I know some of you would know; and Pat Hogan, who won a national award and who operates a child care in a low-income area of Dartmouth. These folks have been waving the flag for a long time and saying we need to do something here. They were pretty excited about the early learning and child care, particularly the signing of the agreement in Nova Scotia that took place at the military family resource centre in May of 2005.
But it was the folks at The Growing Place who had a particular impact on me, because they'd never been involved, and they hadn't fought for this before; they had always run their own show. All of a sudden they had the sense that they were going to do something, first of all about wages, and something about the training of child care workers, and that there was going to be funding. Other people were excited that we were going to be able to provide minority language child care spaces in Nova Scotia as part of the agreement that was being arranged. Some special-needs parents were excited that for the first time they saw light at the end of the tunnel.
So my question is not so much on the money side. I want a sense, from some of you who have been in the child care field for a long time and have fought the battle, of how people are feeling, if that's a fair question.