Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her acknowledgement of the work I have done on disabilities. I am very familiar with the programs she mentioned. I helped draft them and that is why they were in our platform in the last election.
The budget and the update are large documents and they contain a large number of things. There are many worthy things in the documents and that would be one of them. I commend the government for that.
At the same time, the damage that will be done to my province as a result of the changes in the transfer on social services will do so much more damage to those very programs that the province has to deliver around social services. In no way could there be compensation in those things that are positive.
If the government had not changed the social transfer, it would be a different story, but it has. As a consequence, my province will be unable to deliver programs in my community. It has nothing to do with equalization. Nor has it anything to do with the structural inequality. This is an inequality that was created by a decision of the national government in 1977. It protected itself against a cash transfer that had an equalization element inside it to simply mitigate the inequality that was in the tax transfer. It has been eliminated and the results for the smaller provinces are disastrous.
Consequently, with all due respect to the good pieces of this legislation, it cannot trump the damage that will be done by this one single decision.