Madam Chair, I too look forward to the upcoming budget, the first to be tabled in the House of Commons by a woman finance minister.
I would say that the $450 million set aside for skills training and the workforce development on early learning and child care workers is a significant first step in building a system that provides that quality of affordable, accessible care.
On building a secretariat within the Government of Canada, as you can appreciate, this has been mostly done within our provincial and territorial jurisdictions. That secretariat is going to create the capacity for the federal government to do its part.
We already have created more than 40,000 child care spaces in Canada. When the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister say that they have their noses to the grindstone on this one, those are words I take seriously, because never before have we seen the private sector and governments and Canadians on board with the idea of universal early learning and child care as we've seen—