Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's comments and speech were interesting. Like my colleague, I wondered really what it had to do with the issue of the downtown eastside and HIV-AIDS and its prevalence.
While I agree with the hon. member, and we all do because it is kind of like motherhood to say that the way out of poverty is to get a good education and to have economic opportunity, we are talking about a certain cohort of people in an area that has the highest poverty rate in Canada. We are talking about people who have multiple challenges: people with mental illness, people who have lived with abuse, and people who have to deal with the everyday fact that they know they are going to die from HIV-AIDS or hepatitis C or some disease.
They are people who are so challenged with regard even to getting up in the morning that to talk about economic opportunity is far out of their ken, and we need to be able to talk about those other things. We are talking here about poverty so deep and a hopelessness so great that we have to deal with those issues before we can even begin to talk about economic opportunities.
I have a question for the hon. member. That is all very well and good and I know he seems to care a lot about human rights, but if the hon. member and his government care so much about the human rights of aboriginal people, why did they not sign the United Nations convention on aboriginal rights?