Mr. Speaker, I was listening to the speech by the member from the New Democratic Party and it was full of factual inaccuracies.
One of the things she stated was that housing was not mentioned in the budget. I have the budget document here, budget plan 2007, and on page 91, just one of our many initiatives, the section titled “Housing in First Nations Communities”, it reads, “Safe and affordable housing is a basic need for all Canadians”. It goes on to state, “To this end, $300 million will be dedicated to the development of a housing market in First Nations communities”. That is the first factually inaccurate statement she made in her debate.
The second inaccurate statement was that the budget was full of “corporate tax giveaways”. That too does not make any sense to me because here we have the Liberal opposition criticizing our budget for putting a tax on income trusts and removing the deductibility of money borrowed by Canadian corporations for their operations abroad. We are receiving criticism from the Liberal opposition for other tax measures, such as the elimination of the accelerated capital cost allowance for the oil sands. These things are, in fact, not tax giveaways but quite the opposite. They are good for the Canadian economy, which is why we have acted.
I want to address the main point of her speech which was housing. As she knows, coming from London, Ontario, much of the housing is driven by municipal governments, locally owned and run, whether cooperative or non-cooperative developments, and many of these programs are facilitated by provincial governments in terms of affordable housing programs. To that end, our government has invested $39 billion in transfers to this.