Mr. Speaker, I find it quite ironic that the hon. member is talking about poverty and universal child care. There is nothing universal about that child care. It would be universal if there were spaces available.
I have spoken with rural women and they tell me that they have huge problems accessing government services. There are no services nearby. Now that the government has shut down most of the offices of Status of Women Canada, they cannot access those either.
By the time they pay taxes on the $100 a month, it actually comes down to about $48 to $50. Without spaces there is no child care. The women in rural Canada have told me that they need access to government services. They need child care and they need access to training and education so they can get decent jobs. These are the things that they are talking about.
If we are going to talk about immigrant women, and I spent 30 years working with immigrant women in this country, they are coming to my constituency office all the time saying that child care is what they are looking for. They need spaces. Many of them who are here are struggling to establish their lives in this country, looking for work, getting their credentials recognized, and upgrading their ability to speak the language or upgrading their skills so they can find decent jobs. They need child care and there are no spaces. There is no money to pay for infrastructure to establish spaces. This is an empty promise. We can call it what we like, but it does not deliver.
The hon. member goes on talking about all kinds of things that in essence mean nothing. What the government has done, essentially, is impoverished women.
The Liberal government introduced the child benefit plan, which was real income support for low income Canadians in this country. It went a long way to reducing child poverty. We are committed to increase that. The Conservative's $100, which is not at all child care but actually an income supplement, is also taxed, so it is a poor supplement for income. It is absolutely not a child care program at all.
With all due respect, I think the hon. member should take a look at the analysis done by the experts when we did the gender based analysis and talk to her own colleagues, who in fact as a result of that training that we did had to acknowledge that the $100 is not a child care program and does absolutely nothing for women in this country, especially low and middle income Canadians