Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago today I stood in the House to support Ed Broadbent's motion to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Today we stand not in celebration, but in mourning that one in five children lives in poverty. That is more than in 1989.
New Democrats challenge the policies that have led us to this shameful situation: the policy of free trade, which has led to lower wages and more working poor; the policy of getting out of social housing and creating a housing crisis for the poor; the betrayal of promises for a national child care program; the cutbacks in unemployment benefits and the pushing of families on to welfare. All of these and more were deliberate policies that could have been decided otherwise. Shame on the Liberals. They have made stepping on the necks of the poor the cornerstone of their political legacy.
Like the unbridgeable chasm between Lazarus and the rich man in the Biblical story, there is an unbridgeable gap between the Liberals and the poor that no amount of tinkering with the child benefit will make up.