What, an economic update? Was there a budget? Did I miss it? Were there some new initiatives that we had an opportunity to support with enough time to debate? I do not think so.
All we had last fall was an act of desperation to pretend to Canadians that there were some programs, some ideas that would actually deal with years of disappointment on the part of Canadians and make up for the fact that these Liberals had totally neglected working families over a decade.
Let us be clear. The new suit does not fit. The Liberals would have us believe that they were just a cocoon, waiting to emerge as a beautiful butterfly, when in actual fact they are only the old dung beetle.
Let us be clear with what we are dealing. It is absolute hypocrisy on the part of the Liberals to come forward with a motion with a shopping list of items that they had 13 years to bring to Canadians.
I want to clarify for the Liberal members that we will not vote against the very ideas that we have been pushing forward for years. We will not vote against the need for investing in education for which the NDP has been calling for over a decade. We will not vote against a provision that recognizes that the Liberals cut the heck out of our social programs, beginning with the 1995 federal budget, all in the name of balancing books.
They were always telling us that they had to do this so that we could be stronger for it. They had to kill health care to make it better. They had to rip the heck out of our education system in order to improve it. It does not work that way.
The members are now beginning to be aware of the fact that we have to always be cognizant of our human potential. While we want to ensure balanced books, bring down deficits and bring down our debt, we do not want to drive people into poverty, hunger, desperation, isolation and alienation, because we are so fixated on the fiscal end of things we lose sight of the human potential of this great land.
Let us not forget the kind of human deficit that has been created by these Liberals over the last decade. They talk about how great the economy is, conveniently ignoring the fact that we have seen more children than ever go to school hungry. We are no closer to the 1989 Broadbent resolution to eradicate child poverty, then by the year 2000. Here we are in 2006 with the problem even greater than it was in 1989.
We cannot ignore the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds more food banks in our country today because Liberals chose to put their fiscal management issues ahead of any kind of human development.
We saw this country drop from near the top position in terms of the human development index to the bottom. We saw this country take a dive internationally, and even as recently as a couple of weeks a new United Nations reports shows just how deplorable is the situation.
The Liberal government had many opportunities to address these facts. I especially remember the question of aboriginal people and on-reserve housing. I was there when the Auditor General brought down her report and said that she had never had to write such a scathing report in all of the time she had been Auditor General. She pointed to third world conditions. She pointed to such deplorable conditions that we were the laughing stock of many countries around the world.
It is very hard for us today to accept this kind of rhetorical message from the Liberals, when in fact they had a chance to do so much to make our world so much better.
I would like to now hand my speaking spot over, as I indicated at the outset, to my colleague from Windsor. I thank the House for the opportunity and appreciate the fact that we have, once again, had the chance to address the question of how to create a decent life for working families in the 21st century economy.