Mr. Speaker, I must say that I listened very carefully to the throne speech and it was like I was living in 1993 again, just over and over.
I looked at a statement in here on page 9, talking about the reserves:
...the conditions in far too many Aboriginal communities can only be described as shameful.
That was written in 1993, 1997, 2000 and now 2004. I guess we are not doing a very good job of addressing these dismal conditions that exist on the reserves. We got a reprint. We got a rerun.
I remember hearing it loudly in 1993 that we had one million children, the future of our country, living in poverty, what a disgraceful situation that was, and that we would join with the United Nations and eliminate that by the year 2000. Well, it is 2004. We do not have one million children in poverty anymore. According to Statistics Canada, we have 1.5 million. What progress, what wonderful progress.
We are supposed to get excited over a document that continually repeats and repeats itself, year after year. We are supposed to stay awake and listen to it, and in the meantime we have problems across the whole country. Farmers are going under but there was no mention of that.