Mr. Speaker, the hon. member may be surprised to know that I agree with him on two issues. Some of us who ran in the 1993 election and took the promise of a national child care strategy seriously do not consider that promise stale dated. Some of us believe it is an ideal toward which we should be working.
We also understand it is only part of a bundle of services that have to be undertaken at the community level. We do not restrict ourselves to the vision of a national child care strategy, though it would be central to the piece I have described on community.
With regard to the clawback provision and the looseness of the reinvestment framework strategy for the national child benefit, I agree with him again. Whatever else we do in our national action plan we must make sure that a kind of discipline is imposed on ourselves and on the provinces. That discipline will come through the social union framework agreement when we allow ourselves to look at outcomes, to be held accountable to the Canadian public and to make outcomes like school readiness or birth weight, for example, part of the whole package in the accountability regime. We are not as far apart as he might have thought.