Mr. Speaker, all too often when we engage in debate in this House some members refer to the broad national numbers and the departmental impacts from coast to coast. However, I think it is important that we share with the people at home following the debate just how this plays out on individual Canadians. The member's story about Joe Taylor and how the cancellation of this program had an impact on his life and the peril that it placed him in was important to bring to the debate.
What I am also taken by is how the government is not in any way able to justify the cancellation of this program.
A couple of interventions have been made by the member for Wellington—Halton Hills with no substantive reason, trying to reach back and say that this was what the Liberals did. In his last question he tried to identify representation that the front bench would have had. Prior to that, he talked about cuts that had been made in the mid-1990s and tried to equate them to these cuts and the cut to this program, which is a completely different set of circumstance. The government in the mid-1990s was certainly in a deficit situation and it was trying to right the books, but here we are faced with a government that has a surplus situation with no obvious reason to cut this program. It was not because of funding.
So, I would like my colleague--