Mr. Speaker, I notice that my colleague has chosen from the vast cafeteria of issues in the Liberal opposition day to speak mostly on post-secondary education. I am glad that he seized on this, because I do have something that I would like his views of and his comment on.
It seems to me that just before I got into politics in 1997, it was the Liberals who changed the method of transfers to the provinces for health, post-secondary education and social welfare. They changed it from the former mechanism or vehicle to the CHST. At that time, that funding transfer went down from $19 billion to $11 billion. It was the most ruthless cutting, hacking and slashing in history of the Canada health and social transfer. It was a 40% cut.
At that time, the post-secondary institutions took a hit. They took such a blow that they are only now crawling out from under it. Only now are they back up to the level they used to be at in being able to provide reasonable post-secondary education.
In my own home province of Manitoba, the universities had no choice but to off-load that burden onto tuition fees and create an untenable situation for students. It created an unmanageable situation in that if we wanted to be ready for the next century, and if communities wanted to be ready for the next knowledge generation, all the kids could do was pay higher tuition fees.
Manitoba froze tuition in 1999. As soon as the NDP formed the government, it froze tuition fees. They are frozen to this day, seven years later, which is really tough. Frankly, it is not working well, because the infrastructure of our universities is crumbling. But we have decided to hang on and keep fighting the federal ruling parties of the day to make them give us our fair share of the Canada health and social transfer so that we do not have to watch the bricks and mortar of our of our universities crumble and we do not have to burden our kids with graduating with something the size of a mortgage.
It is the member's party that started this whole fiasco we have, this crisis in post-secondary education. I want to know how he justifies that in his own mind, because he was sitting around the cabinet table during that terrible time.