Mr. Speaker, looking through the throne speech, listening to it carefully, and having been here for 10 years and having heard other throne speeches, it appears to me that about 90% of the throne speech is what I would call reruns. The hon. member who just spoke addressed one of those rerun items and that is poverty. One of the new ideas in the throne speech is the GST rebate to cities.
I have two questions I would like to ask the member with regard to both of those items.
I know how much the government loves money and how it hates to lose revenue. It has demonstrated that ever since I have been here. The government will lose some revenue by giving back the GST to cities. I was wondering if the government would be reducing the transfer payments to provinces to make up for the loss of the GST.
Why, when in 1993 one million children were declared to be living in poverty and the government declared a war on it and indicated it would be wiped out by 2000, is it that in 2004 we now have 1.5 million children living in poverty? It looks to me like a dismal failure on the part of the government.