Mr. Speaker, I obviously disagree almost completely with the member. She misses the point and that has been the problem with this whole budget. Little tax credits, deductions, and tax incentives do not create programs that make a difference and ensure that everyone is able to be treated equally.
A tax credit for people with disabilities will help those who have put away all kinds of money. How many people with disabilities does the parliamentary secretary know that are so wealthy they can put aside all this money so that they can then have tax credits to support themselves in their adult lives? It does not make any sense.
Does she know how far that money would go if in fact we took the money for that tax credit and put it into housing for people with disabilities, into programs that gave better salaries to the people who look after those people with disabilities, and if we helped to support communities rather than to give out little tax incentives that do not go very far?
Let us look at a similar tax incentive, the child tax credit. How is it that the government can stand and support a tax credit that actually gives more money to a family with one person at home that is making $100,000? That family gets more of a child tax credit than a single parent mother making less than $30,000. How is that justice? Would we not want to try to correct those kinds of inequities?
Let me quote what the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada said about child care at our hearings just a week or two ago. It said:
This budget represents a loss to communities, to families, and to children. Almost $1 billion in committed child care funding is being taken away. It's a cut of $27 million to the children of Saskatchewan alone.
Let me say one more thing. I want to quote from the Muttart Foundation, a very respectable organization that gets rolls of money from government and had the gumption to speak up about cuts to literacy and other programs. This letter says:
--programs that assist the disabled, programs that improve the welfare of young children, the program changes announced this week disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in our country and the agencies that have tried to work with them.
Moreover, elimination of such programs as the First Nations and Inuit Tobacco Reduction Strategy, reduction in health-research grants, even the social economy initiative which held out hope for new ways of caring for people, all will have significant negative impacts on Canadians and the voluntary agencies that serve them.
We also mourn the loss of those programs which supported alternative means of researching and developing public policy. All good ideas do not come from government, as you have noted. But the elimination of funding that created capacity in voluntary agencies to engage in policy work will mean that only those--