Madam Speaker, the member delivered a strong and cogent speech and a strong, comprehensive statement on what our government did in the previous Parliament and what it plans to do going forward. I truly enjoyed listening to it.
The member spoke a lot about infrastructure or what I like to call hardware at this point. Of course, it is absolutely important that we invest in infrastructure, because in this day and age, if a country does not invest in infrastructure, it will get left behind.
However, there are other initiatives that our government took that could be called software, such as the investment in the Canada child benefit and the investment in the Canada training benefit. These are sometimes looked at as spending and often we are criticized because of spending items. However, they are in fact investments in the future, because healthy children grow up to be healthy workers. Parents who get the Canada child benefit can afford to invest in RESPs and so forth. Obviously, if workers can retrain, they can get the skills needed to solve the environmental and other scientific challenges we face in this modern and complex world.
I would like to hear the member's comments on that distinction and why even those expenditures that seem like soft expenditures are in fact investments in the future of the country.