Mr. Speaker, the member has a short memory. I think he cannot see past the tip of his nose. I must remind the member that the Parti Quebecois government was elected only a few weeks ago and that, for the past ten years, it was his Liberal friends in Quebec who had been managing the health care system.
I would like to remind the member, who does not seem to be too firmly grounded in reality, that money you have to live on is not what appears on paper but what you have left in your hand. With an income of $25,000, I say that you live in poverty. If the member looked at the government's statistics, he would know that with $25,000 you are in dire straits. Many times, when you are paying for your groceries, you wonder if you should not put an item back on the shelf because you do not know if you are going to have enough money to pay the bill.
The money in your hand is a far cry from what appears on paper. When the amount on paper is $50,000 and you are left with only $25,000, it is because the government took the other $25,000. This is what it means.
Does the member realize that, while there are 800,000 unemployed people, his government has just taken some extraordinary steps cutting social programs and training, and that the Minister of Human Resources Development has just announced an astounding proposal asking students to get deeper into debt, under the pretence of making it easier to have access to training? What the minister is telling university and post-secondary students is this: "We are giving you better access to funding from banks and credit unions so that you can get deeper into debt and we are cutting grants and bursaries". We know very well that to get a bachelor's degree now, a student piles up a debt of about $9,000 or $10,000.
A student who goes as far as the doctoral or post-doctoral level leaves university $40,000 in debt. That is what your government is doing!
That government is doing nothing to stimulate employment. They invested in infrastructure, which is not a bad program, as everyone admits, except where do young people get jobs in the infrastructure program? Where do women find work in the infrastructure projects? Nothing, zero.
The Prime Minister said that when we see trucks rolling in the streets, the economic recovery will be under way. That is a very short-sighted way to look at economic recovery and it is especially short-sighted to think that you will put people back to work just by digging in the streets. It is an old, well-known model that works in some ways, but they did not think of training. They did not think of investing in young entrepreneurs. What the government is doing is the opposite of what it
announced during the election campaign. It was elected with NDP-style advertisements that said, "We will protect social programs. We will create jobs". It was elected with many promises that are now completely rejected.
The finance minister's budget and all the reform proposals clearly show us that they are doing the opposite and can only think of cutting $15 billion from operating expenses in the budget at the expense of all the poorest people, in order to protect their friends, the richest people who back that regime.
I would conclude with this. If only this government were honest enough to apply the red book, as they said in their advertisements, every time they refer to it, we could at least be working on the economic recovery in some ways, but they are not doing that, on the contrary. They are acting to the detriment of the very poor, women, young people, training, education. Again I say to the hon. member: If you have $25,000 in your pocket, you are poor in a society where everything costs more, with taxes on food, medicine, the basic needs of families, rent, etc. You may have $50,000 on paper, sir, but that is not what you have in your pocket. Remember that!