Mr. Speaker, thank you for pointing out the rules to the member because he clearly does not understand them.
The regional government spent five million of local taxpayer dollars on day care because of the savage cuts the government made to day care. It also had to pick up the EnerGuide evaluation component of the program, an important program for the environment and one which that member's party trashed.
In terms of safer communities, we have one of the safest communities in the Waterloo region. The Community Safety and Crime Prevention Council brings various groups together, such as the leaders of the community, the police, the courts, the mayors, the school boards, the service clubs and community volunteers, who work on crime prevention. Its response to crime is not the same as the Conservative Party's response to crime. It recognizes that the Association of Chiefs of Police has called for fighting crime through social development. It also says that more police officers, more jail guards and more jails will not make our communities safer but that they will be less safe.
I quote the response of the Chamber of Commerce in our area as to what it had to say about the budget. It was disappointed.
I represent a riding that, probably more than any other, demonstrates the importance of investing in education and in research and development. All one needs to do is to look at the community. We have the University of Waterloo, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, Wilfrid Laurier University and Conestoga College, some of which I share with the member for Cambridge, seeing as a school of architecture is down there.
What my community dramatically demonstrates is that when we invest in education and in research and development a huge amount of wealth is created, which is clearly what happened in our region. To the extent that investments were made in education I say that is good, but to the extent that funding for the granting council did not match inflation, that is bad.
The biggest thing that bothers me about the budget was very well stated in a headline in Macleans, “Next time, perhaps, a vision for the future”. The budget really has no vision for the future. If we were to look at vision, we should be looking at things like early childhood education, which was slashed by the Conservative government, and the Kelowna accord, which was slashed by the government, that would have brought our first nations out of a cycle of poverty. The Kelowna accord would have allowed all governments, territorial, provincial and federal, to make progress on that file. We only need to look at what happened to Kyoto? The budget has no vision on those things.
I will specifically mention something good in the budget. The Perimeter Institute received $50 million. The previous Liberal government gave money to the Perimeter Institute. The provincial government gave two grants, one to Perimeter Institute for $50 million and one to IQC, the Institute for Quantum Computing, for $50 million. Unfortunately, the Conservative government did not see the wisdom of giving money to the Institute for Quantum Computing. If we solve the puzzle of the quantum, then we will be at the forefront of the next revolution, the kind of which mankind has not seen. It really takes investment in those kinds of things to make that happen.