Madam Speaker, I know the hon. member has done excellent work protecting the first nations in his area. He certainly will not get any quarrel from me that for a long time there has been insufficient funding to change the disparity between first nations and the rest of Canadians. He is absolutely correct that we put in the Kelowna accord, when those funds were available, the biggest attempt in history to reduce those discrepancies. So I, too, am very disappointed.
Even the items he has lobbied for, and I notice that schools for instance are in the budget to some extent, may be an improvement over what there was in the past. However, these things should have been done long ago, and more money for water systems. Could members imagine if we had not acted immediately and it were not on some distant reserve, and if our water had those types of problems? These are things for which we have constantly pushed.
There are some steps in the right direction in the budget but as the member said succinctly, there needs to be much more. We will constantly, as we have in the past, push even more to reduce these disparities.