All this for a grand total of $544,087.
And there are single mothers; there are 1.5 million children living in poverty in Canada. The Prime Minister does not only have feathers to put in his cap, he has spots. Spots like my dalmatians, and this is one very spotty record. One and a half million poor children in Canada, for several years now, as we have noted. Small children who go to school on an empty stomach.
The Prime Minister should look after people and not behave like some sort of ethereal monarch who transcends a nation, not to say the world. He should have a bit of compassion and pity for the poor, for those less able to cope than he, for the sick, for those less talented than he is at making politics work for him and building a career as he has done all his life at the expense of taxpayers and of the less fortunate, who sometimes move a little more slowly, because we are not all race horses.
He has no pity for these people. One might even say the Prime Minister detests them. He must not like them very much to have the nerve to come to us this evening asking for a $101 million increase in the Treasury Board budgets. If only he would put this money to good use.
I saw the minister of intergovernmental affairs. He looked ridiculous not so long ago at the Standing Joint Committee on Official Languages. He promised us a plan for bilingualism in Canada, a plan to restore the official languages, using the Treasury Board's budgets; he has still not delivered anything. He has done nothing so far. He is sidestepping the issue and he does not seem any closer to producing anything.
We are talking about $101 million to throw into the kitty so that the Prime Minister can parade around like the cock of the walk, grandstanding all over the place. What he is doing is exploiting the poor, exploiting Canadians, exploiting workers who work their fingers to the bone just to bring not even half their pay home.