Madam Speaker, I would like to ask a few questions of the Bloc Québécois member who has just spoken.
I listened very carefully to the member's speech. I was with him when he condemned the government for the introduction of a budget that failed to deliver what was needed for affordable housing and energy retrofitting. I was with him absolutely all the way when he condemned the budget because it did not put money, as promised, into post-secondary education and training. I was with him all the way when he talked about how disgraceful it was that the original Liberal budget introduced in the House did not commit in any meaningful way to overseas development assistance. It did not even come close to putting in place timetables and targets to deliver on our longstanding commitment, actually a standard set by Canada in the first instance, of moving to commit 0.7% of our GDP to overseas development assistance.
Then he lost me, because he then said that his party could not support Bill C-48, which actually brings in concrete remedies for every one of those things that the Bloc members say was wrong with the original budget.
Let me make it absolutely clear that the budget does not deal with all of the shortcomings. It does not deal with everything we would like to see remedied. However, it is absolutely not accurate to characterize the budget as failing to address any of these things which the member himself outlined as priorities, because it precisely commits to deliver $4.5 billion. I get excited at the thought of that money being directed to the very priorities the member talked about.
I wonder if he could explain how it is that the very priorities he mentioned now are addressed in Bill C-48, yet he is rationalizing his way to a partnership with a party that he absolutely knows would not stand behind any of those priorities. It never has and never will. The damage and destruction caused by that party, by the ultra cons, the no longer progressive Conservatives, is exactly why we are in desperate shape trying to rebuild commitments to affordable housing, post-secondary education, energy retrofitting, public transit, all of the things that have been torn down because of the responsiveness of the Liberal government to those pressures not to do those things. Now the member wants to enter into an alliance with that party and call it progress. How does he explain that?