Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the hon. member opposite. He is a person, over the few years I have been here, who has a social conscience, as I hope many of us here do, and his concern for the needs of society are probably second to none.
I have no argument whatsoever that people need money for education. One need only to check Hansard to see how often I have raised the need for investment in education. I have no doubt that we need shelters for the homeless. We have abandoned the people on the lower end of our society, people who cannot help themselves.
However I do have one concern. If the Liberals have the feeling that we must help people, that we must invest in education and that we must invest in housing to help the homeless, why is the money in Bill C-48, which he says must pass because we need to do this for these people, and not in the original budget? Why did the Liberals not think about these people when they brought down the budget? Why was it not brought in until they had to buy the NDP for a quarter of a billion dollars each to get its support to stay in power? How can they justify that in the eyes of the public?