Mr. Speaker, I have been called all sorts of things but naive may not be one of them.
Anyone who knows the history of my political life knows that all through the 1990s I pushed desperately for a national child care program. A whole generation of children have now grown up without child care. It is heartbreaking to see because many parents were promised it, whether it was in 1987 with the Brian Mulroney child care act, or the 1993 red book, or the 1997 red book, or the 2000 red book.
In 2004, whether we call it an early childhood development initiative or a multilateral framework agreement, we could call it all sorts of things but there was no child care program delivered. In fact in Toronto there were fewer child care spaces two years ago then in 1992 because of the various budget cuts by the federal government and of course by the provincial government also.
The child care program that we have been pushing for, which the last Liberal government finally began to put in place in its minority government, unfortunately was not enshrined in legislation. That allowed the new government to come in and cancel the agreements. Imagine if there were a national child care act that enshrined child care into legislation, today we would be in the House debating a child care act, not these bilateral agreements that can be cancelled with the stroke of a pen.
I put the fault of not having a national child care program with the way the former Liberal government created it.