Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have a bad habit of announcing big programs for big money that do not actually work.
In Kitchener South, Mohammad Keshvani invested $1.6 million of his own savings and loans to build Angus Valley Montessori, a beautiful child care centre that can serve 100 children. Parents are calling every day and more than 450 families are on the wait-list, yet those spaces are almost all sitting empty.
Why is this? It is because the subsidy system is broken. The federal government takes money from taxpayers in Kitchener, brings it up to Ottawa, sends some of that to the province, the province sends some of that to the municipality and, at the end of that chain, 450 tax-paying families are not seeing a dime of what they put into the system.
The Liberals want to take credit for a universal child care system, but they never take responsibility when 14,000 families in Waterloo region cannot find proper child care. I call on the Liberals to fix their broken child care system so that Mr. Keshvani and his wife can live their dream of providing high-quality child care to my friends and neighbours in Kitchener. Conservatives will restore child care—