Mr. Speaker, I know my colleague is well informed about these things and I know he will have followed the 18th century and 19th century debates in legislatures across the country about public schools and universal education, and how important it was in those days, as the industrial revolution was moving along, to have an educated population that at least attended elementary school.
I am sure he is also familiar with the debates later on about whether high school should be universal. Now he is talking about early childhood development. In more than two out of three families in this country both parents work. Not just the care but the education which families in the past did is now a matter of public debate. Before elementary school existed it was assumed that families did this for their own children.
I hear him saying there should be choices for parents. I am not exactly sure what he means by that. In the elementary schools there are private options. In high schools there are private options. However we first put in place the public systems and we gave the parents choice through those public systems, through school boards and involvement in school boards, in the process of raising the taxes and actually spending the taxes.
Now he is talking about these children being denied full public early childhood education. It is not a matter of something in the future. It is already late that we as a society are doing this. I would like his comments on that. Would he in the 18th and 19th centuries have been arguing against public education, high school and elementary school, the way he is arguing now?
He talked about the gun registry and gun control. The total cost, as he knows, of all gun control, gun control at the borders and gun control on our streets over 10 years, is at $1 billion. The gun registry is one-twentieth of that. Does he think that that one-two thousandth of the federal budget was too much to give us the control over guns that we have at the present time?