Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague. He is somewhat new to this place so he might not remember the number of budgets that his colleagues helped pass, those same Conservative budgets that he just criticized, which spilled billions of dollars into unfortunate areas.
I sense the conviction in my hon. colleague, although he is not listening, when he tries to represent those who are hardest hit by the recession. He made a somewhat unfortunate argument about a national housing strategy. His party was in power for 13 years. It was his party's 1995 budget that everyone will remember, the crippling rebalancing and reshaping of Canada's social fabrics. Those social programs were created in the early seventies by a minority Parliament with the assistance of New Democrats. They were then dismantled in the social transfer payments to the provinces.
While I commend my colleague for his obvious passion for those less fortunate and those struggling to make ends meet, it is a little rich for Canadians to hear this from Liberal members who for so long have supported the Conservative government's agenda, its budgets and essentially its beliefs on how the country ought to be run.
If the words were matched by action, perhaps we on this side of the House could be more sympathetic, but unfortunately they are not.