Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate my hon. colleague for the excellent work he has been doing. I agree with him 100%. It is about the importance of early learning and the child care spaces that we need to have in our cities and our communities across the country.
It is one thing to hand out a cheque for $100. Every person would love to have $100. If the government were throwing $100 to every family, that would be fantastic, but it is a question of priorities. How do we set priorities in this country? We do not have an infinite amount of money. We need to ensure that money is properly allocated to programs that alleviate poverty, homelessness and where we can get children into early childhood learning programs.
The only way we can do that, with the amount of money and the budgets that we have, is by making strong investments in child care programs, which is what we were doing. We were doing that in partnership with our cities and in partnership with provincial premiers across this country. That is a very important piece of the pie that the government, unfortunately, has missed out on when it talked about early childhood education.
It is not about just handing $100 to everybody. Some people may even call that buying votes. This is about making investments, an investment in our children, an investment in our communities, and an investment in early learning, which is exactly what our plan had but the government killed it.