Mr. Speaker, under the Liberal plan for a national system of early learning and child care, the understanding was that it was for early learning. It was to build a system and a sense of what a system is, like an education system or an elementary system. It would be there for everybody. It would be there for parents and kids in big cities and those in small towns.
One of the great advantages of the steps that we were able to take over one year was the fact that the provinces had about 48% more money to meet the needs of underrepresented areas like rural areas and underrepresented needs like people with special needs. This is exactly what creating a system means. This is not truthiness. This was a real system of early learning. This was a real system that would be there for every kid and kids with parents in lots of different circumstances and with lots of different needs. There are very few parents who, when they decide to stay at home, also do not want their kids having different experiences in somewhat different circumstances in the course of a week. This was not an all or nothing thing. It was not five days a week or no days a week. It was for a day a week, or two afternoons a week--