Mr. Speaker, first off, I wish to congratulate my New Democratic Party colleague for her great sensitivity to the less fortunate, particularly children.
As I said last week, everyone agreed back in 1989 that we should eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Today, the number of poor children stands at 1.5 million, a 500,000 increase.
What this means is that, since 1993, this government has shown no compassion. This is terrible, when children do not get enough to eat, when they go to school without a lunch, when they do not have proper clothes to wear and are made fun of, and at the same time the taxes of rich Canadians are going down. I call that a scandal, an outright scandal.
I hope the members opposite will agree with the NDP leader that this is a scorched earth policy, and that is exactly what I mean.
I ask my wonderfully sensitive colleague how we are going to get to zero poverty in the near future, if it is possible at all, because I am losing hope. Fortunately, we already have a zero deficit. However, we must get to zero poverty in four or five years.
Zero poverty should be everyone's goal. How can we make them understand? I do not know if they have it in them. How can we get together and make them understand that zero poverty should be everyone's goal?