Those two governments are the NDP governments of Saskatchewan and British Columbia. In particular, the premier of my own province has been a major advocate of this program and has regarded it as essential to make sure child poverty is efficiently and effectively dealt with across the country. He and many others are concerned that this proposal presented in the budget is not sufficiently adequate to meet the needs of children across the country and is not one which has national standards attached to it to make sure those moneys actually find their way into children's support programs. I am pleased to indicate today that in the Saskatchewan budget further leadership has been shown on this question, as the Government of Saskatchewan has introduced the Saskatchewan component of this program today, not as the federal government has suggested sometime in 1998. The Minister of Finance has indicated that child poverty is a national disgrace in this country.
Canadian children deserve better than that.
This is the easy way out. It shows no national leadership and no national commitment to solving the challenges the country faces. It is a dissatisfaction that Canadians feel in general with the government's refusal to accept responsibilities for the massive cuts that have taken place in social programs. We have seen three successive Liberal budgets which have clobbered poor and lower income families in Canada. As we know and as we should have expected and as was presumably predicted by the Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister and other ministers responsible, poverty has increased in this country over the years of Liberal government.