Mr. Speaker, all we have to do is listen to the Minister of National Defence when he stands on the F-35s. The Conservatives have spent $700 million to date and then he stands and says that not one penny has been spent on the F-35 acquisition. Of course he cannot acquire it. It does not exist yet. There is only a paper machier version that he uses for press conferences. The Conservatives have started to master that type of thing.
When the Prime Minister responded to Jack Layton's specific question “Are you going to cut pensions”?, his hand on his heart, the Prime Minister said, “We will not be cutting pensions”. When Conservatives added two more years and took $13,000 out of the pockets of five million old security recipients, what did the Minister of Finance have the temerity to stand and say? He said that the government said it would not touch pensions, but it never said it would not touch old age security. What a rim shot.
This is the Conservative way, as if the amount of money seniors get to live on after retirement was not generically the pension for the average Canadian, that is unbelievable hypocrisy. There are certain measures of the civilization that we live in, of the society that we live in. In a country as rich as Canada, it is unthinkable that we have hundreds of thousands of elderly who have worked all their lives living in poverty. We will change that.
How is it possible that after 900 pages of budget bills we are not doing anything to deal with situations like the third world conditions in places like Attawapiskat? How is it possible in a country as rich as Canada that we still allow those third world conditions to continue—