As my friend from Winnipeg says, we are not surprised. We are not.
I thought Brian Mulroney was kind of a wild and woolly right winger. Compared to the Minister of Finance he sounds like some kind of economic piker. He tried to move the agenda to the right but he failed.
I know my friends thought at the time this seemed a bit perplexing. As a matter of fact, back in 1990 the Minister of Finance he wrote a report on housing. He spent a number of weeks touring the country on housing and wrote a report on it.
As a matter of fact, to be fair, he used the term homelessness once in his budget. The term was actually there. There was one reference to the fact that we have homeless people in the country. We happen to have hundreds of thousands of homeless people. This has been identified by the mayors of every major city in Canada as a national tragedy. The finance minister did mention it. Here is what he had to say in 1990:
The federal role in housing must not be a residual one. The connection between housing and other aspects of both social and economic policy means that the federal government must take a lead role. Only the national government has the financial resources to address the full dimensions of the needs of this country.