Madam Speaker, I want to put it on the record, just to be clear, I do not think I have ever agreed with that member. However, there are a few points in his speech that I agree with today. I certainly agreed that the NDP ridiculed the Liberal national housing strategy in 2015. The member said that we said it was not enough, and I certainly agree with that. It was not enough because there was nothing there.
The problem with the Liberals is they think that if they keep saying something it will become true. When we kept trying to find out where the national housing strategy was, we had the national housing strategy person, the member for Spadina—Fort York, who got up very defensively, said that they had helped over a million Canadians. We wanted to know where the million Canadians were. Then when the member was questioned on it, it turned out he had just made that up. He said it was for rhetorical advantage, to misrepresent numbers about a basic housing strategy.
If we listen to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, someone the Liberals seem dead set against and have tried to undermine, his latest comments on the Liberal national housing strategy are that they maintain “current funding levels for current activities and slightly reduced targeted funding” for current activities. If we get through the bureaucratese and economics of that, it means the Liberals have basically been putting jack squat into a national housing strategy and they plan to maintain a jack squat national housing strategy.
That leads me to my final point. I agree with the member that the Liberals are always willing to put money in the pockets of people they think need it the most, like Galen Weston, $12 million to fix his fridges. The Liberals think he needs that the most. We are here talking about people who cannot get dental care.
I do not know if the member understands what it is like to be without dental care, but I meet people without dental care all time and they are not people in the Liberal universe. We are here to say we could have a reasonable strategy to help with dental care or we could have more and more of this kind of Liberal rhetoric for advantage that helps no one.