Yes, there's $282 million for veterans.
There has been a strong emphasis in the past three budgets on the role this government plays through the military and with the military, as well as on security, policing, and trade-related items. There is new spending, it's true. That spending is crowding out the more long-term preventive things that we know can build the resilience of this nation.
This government spent a lot of political capital on conditioning the Canadian public that there was very little room to move as we walked into this next budget: there was a lot of news from the IMF, and “we have huge problems”, and.... It was very reminiscent, actually, of the run-up to the 1995 budget, when we were told that we had hit a debt wall.
There's a lot of political capital spent on telling us, as Canadians, “don't expect much”. But what new spending is there is in a particular direction. There was $5 billion in new spending there; it's in a particular direction.
Women have been told to wait in good times and bad. Can't you invest in some of these things whose repercussions we know are huge? They build resilience, they build communities, they strengthen society, and they prepare the next generation of workers.
There's money there: $43 billion in measures over three years. There was money there to do something, to do more than what you did.