Mr. Speaker, I have to wonder what people, who are watching this at home, think about all of us. We are tossing around all of these numbers, but Canadians know what the numbers are. They know that when we became government in 1993, there was a huge deficit. I heard many comments about the fact that at that point Canada was on the verge of bankruptcy. It took all Canadians, led by our prime minister and finance minister, to make a huge amount of cuts to get our finances and our country under control. We have the opportunity now to reinvest in our children, in our housing, in our seniors and, more important, to ensure that we reinvest in our young people.
We talk about the child care issue as if it is some kind of babysitting service. Child care is about investing in early childhood education. If we are going to be competing with Switzerland and all of the other countries, we have to ensure that our children get an early start to education. This is not about babysitting. It is a really important issue.
We had a plan going forward that would have ensured that all children in our country, who wanted an opportunity to learn early, would have that opportunity. They would then be well positioned to compete with others. Giving $25 a week for babysitting, is a pretty big insult to all women. More important, it does not move us forward as a country. We are supposed to be investing in innovation and all of these issues. That means we need to give women the opportunity to give their children early childhood education.