Mr. Speaker, the area I want to touch on the most, which my colleague from Mississauga mentioned, is the insinuation that the reason big cities like Toronto and Vancouver have so many homeless, and included in that homeless are 35% with mental illness, 15% aboriginals, 10% abused women, 28% youth of which 70% are physically or sexually abused, is that there are shelters and places to look after them.
I would suggest that we are really putting that in the wrong context. The bottom line is any person I knew who ended up in such a situation where they had no home or place to go or shelter to rely on, did so because they usually were leaving someplace that was a hell of a lot worse. They were looking for something better, which was not there. However they were stuck there because they did not have a penny in their pocket to perhaps get back.
To suggest that people with mental will head to that magnet of Toronto, what about looking at the real issue. Our health care system has failed and we no longer have supports in place in a lot of those communities because we do not have the dollars going into the health care system. We have priorized wrong. As a government, the priorities have been wrong. When dollars should have gone to support those small communities so they could keep people in their communities, they were not there. When dollars should have gone into aboriginal communities and education should have been in aboriginal communities, they were not there. They are looking for something better.
On behalf of every aboriginal from my riding who has left a horrible situation on a reserve to look for something better, I take exception to someone suggesting they went there for a free place at a homeless shelter.