Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments, but not so much the particularly jingoistic, offensive ones in the last couple of statements.
He is suggesting that parents who choose a child care option are somehow, in his words, institutionalizing their children, that the two-thirds of Canadian families who choose to put their kids in either public or private child care are somehow not being, in a sense, good parents, which I do not think he was meaning to insinuate. This institutionalized aspect of child care I find offensive, as someone who has used child care services in the past and who seeks out, as many parents do, good child care options for their children. We are not bad parents. We believe in choice.
The member kept raising the prospect or the spectre of income splitting as one of the options for the government, a $2.5 billion program it overwhelming favours. However, in the budget bill of 460 pages, we find so many items that have nothing to do with the budget at all.
When the Conservatives were in opposition, they hated omnibus bills. They said they were undemocratic and unfair. What changed? What happened to those Conservatives, like the Prime Minister and all his ministers, who said that it was a bad way to govern and was unfair to MPs representing their constituents?