Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Repentigny. I am sure he does not want to involve me in his argument with my colleague from Abitibi.
I just want to point out to the hon. member for Repentigny that the government has already started to fight poverty. If you had gone through the previous budgets brought down by the government, you would have noticed that the first step to take is to reduce the deficit, which is what the current government has done.
But even in its attempt to reduce the deficit, the government decided to start by helping the poorest of the poor, the unborn child. In our minds, poverty starts with pregnant women who do not have the means or the money to eat three meals a day. We started by creating a fund to help those mothers. That was a start. It is very interesting to note that, for young people living in poverty, the first years are the most crucial.
The first thing we did was to help pregnant women to ensure that their children, the future generation of Canadians, were born healthy.
Then, in the last budget brought down by the government, you must have noticed that we have taxable and non-taxable benefits that are handed out to the poorest members of our society. Unlike the Reform Party, which wants to reduce taxes for everyone, our government has decided to help out the most needy, the poorest of the families.
In a family earning $20,000 or less, the mother would get $1,600 for her first child and $1,400 for her second child, for a total of $3,000 or 15% of her family budget.
We have chosen to fight poverty by helping out the poorest members of our society, which we did in the last budget. We had set aside $850 million for 1998, and we will add $425 million for 1999 and another $425 million for the year 2000.