Mr. Speaker, I find it rather ingenuous that we keep talking about the early education and child care promise of the Liberals that never came to be.
Actually, the hon. member knows full well that there was an agreement with the province of Ontario on health care with a very major agreement on child care. There was an historic agreement on child care. It was on the front page of the Toronto Star. There is no point for the member to shake her head. It is true. She can go to the Internet herself. We wanted to start a national child care program and we could not get the provinces to agree to anything.
In fact, she will recall the premier of Ontario insisted on cherry picking. The mistake the Liberals made, and I will admit it, was to back off and allow that to happen. It should not have happened. The premier created what was called the early years program.
We went back again to negotiate with the provinces because the program has to be delivered by the provinces. We again negotiated and ended up with an agreement with all the provinces, except for New Brunswick which had a Conservative government and was not interested. There was $5 billion on the table and the program was in fact pretty much on its way.
The funding was there. This is what we are talking about. We are all so upset about the funds being cut by the government in February 2007, which is money that was already flowing to the provinces. The program was there, but the NDP chose to knock the government down and that is something for which it has to accept responsibility.
On pay equity of course, it could have been done sooner. I would like to have done it 10 years ago. It was not done, but as a response to the report of the standing committee we said that there would be legislation tabled in the fall. In the fall we were not in an election, but I can tell--