Mr. Speaker, the hon. minister misses the point entirely. As I said very clearly in my speech, we are in favour of saving money and we are in favour of reallocating from low to high priorities. He is talking about $1 billion. Our expenditure committee found $11 billion to reallocate, 11 times more than what he is talking about. That is not the point.
The point is not whether it is a good thing for government to save money and to reallocate to higher priorities. The point is the things the government cuts and the ideological, mean-spirited nature of those cuts. I do not object to government savings. We did more than it did but we did not apply a reverse fairness lens to specifically target the cuts on the least privilege or target cuts on women. We did the reverse.
It is not the principle of reallocation that we object to. It is the mean-spirited nature of those cuts which are ideologically focused on the most vulnerable in society.
The second point is that when the museum people came to the finance committee they told us that they were devastated by the cuts. The literacy people had a $17.7 million, or 30%, cut and they have $40 million left. That is criminal. There are 8 million or 9 million people in Canada who have literacy problems. We are competing in a knowledge economy globally and the government cuts 30% of the funding to literacy. That is just unconscionable.