Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Trois-Rivières made an excellent speech. I must say I am sympathetic to her very well crafted arguments, in that the province of Manitoba finds itself in a situation similar to that of the province of Quebec. We signed an agreement with the Government of Canada--not with the Liberal Party and not with the Conservatives, but with the government--with the expectation that we would have five years of stable funding to begin to put together a day care system like the one the province of Quebec already enjoys.
Our problem is that we used the money to raise the salaries of all of our day care workers in the public sector, because they were terribly underpaid, and then to open a bunch of new spaces. Now the federal government has unilaterally torn up that agreement. We are in a terribly difficult situation. How do we ask these people to now roll their wages back? We cannot. How do we close these spaces that have filled with children already? We cannot. The province of Manitoba is going to have to come up with this money, as will the province of Quebec.
Does my colleague believe there is any hope of convincing the federal government to change its mind and fulfill the commitments made by the Government of Canada?