Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for a challenging but thoughtful question.
We have balanced our budget, and now we are helping families balance theirs. Our low-tax plan will allow income splitting for parents to put up to $2,000 back into their pockets. We have increased the Conservative universal child care benefit to almost $2,000 for every child under six and to $720 for every child six through 17. That means we put money directly in the pockets of families.
While the NDP and Liberals would take that money away and raise taxes to fund new bureaucracies, we disagree. We are giving the dollars back to the more than eight million real child care experts who are out there, and their names are Mom and Dad.