Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the minister and the member for Winnipeg South Centre for the tone and the content of their remarks. I want to thank the member for Winnipeg South Centre for giving us the opportunity to be seized with this issue today. It is the most compelling social issue that we have in this country.
It is helpful if we all start this important debate from the same base level of facts and do away with some of the misinformation. I too was at Kelowna and I was there for the whole event. I know the minister was there as well because we sat together for much of that gathering.
It would do all of us a service as we spend the rest of the day discussing this issue to get some clarity from the minister to see if he understands the numbers the same way I do. If we subtract $700 million, which was the health care money that was announced and re-announced many times in the most cynical of ways, from $5.1 billion that brings it down to $4.4 billion. If we take $550 million for housing, which was money in the NDP Bill C-48, that leaves $3.85 billion over five years. This is where the member for Winnipeg South Centre and I have some disagreement. We negotiated $1.6 billion for housing of which we said one-third should go toward aboriginal housing which would be $550 million. Perhaps the minister could confirm that if that $550 million was not tied to Kelowna it would have been spent, but because it was tied to Kelowna, it was never rolled out.
First nations have asked me what happened to the money in Bill C-48. They want to know why their housing budgets have not doubled because of the money that the NDP negotiated on their behalf. They want to know where that money is. We said it was tied to Kelowna. Is that true or not? Since 1992, $261 million was fixed and it never changed in the 13 years the Liberals were in government. That was the total housing budget.
Can the minister confirm or deny my understanding of the figures?