Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hochelaga—Maisonneuve, whom I have known for a long time. I like to remind this House that he was my student at the Collège Maisonneuve a few years ago. If there is anyone in this House who can say whether or not my courses were good, he can. I will start with his last question.
Indeed, I think that this bill should be withdrawn. It is totally irresponsible for the government to introduce such a bill. It even goes against the recent historical trends. What are we going to look like internationally if we take away the responsibilities of lenders who invest in projects related to the nuclear industry, an industry that everyone is abandoning? We will look like dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we know what happened to dinosaurs; they disappeared.
If the government were paying attention to what is going on in the world, it would withdraw this bill and put more energy into the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Instead of introducing legislation like Bill C-4, which is somewhat of a waste of time since it is dealing with something which will no longer be an option a few years from now—I am not talking in terms of decades, I clearly said that nuclear energy is being abandoned in all industrialized countries—we should take more time to discuss the Kyoto protocol. The Prime Minister told us there would be a vote on this issue before the Christmas recess. This protocol is extremely important. Some members in this House, including some Liberals, still have reservations about the importance of the protocol. We know that some members of the Canadian Alliance also have reservations about it.
We could have used this time to explore the implications of the Kyoto protocol and such things as how to share the costs. Indeed, there will be costs but let us be clear; there will also be benefits. I mentioned wind energy but the same can be said about some other soft renewable energies. Those kind of energies generate many more jobs than non-renewable energies such as oil, or renewable energies which present a serious safety threat, such as nuclear energy.
We should ratify the Kyoto protocol and agree that cost sharing be done on a territorial basis, taking into account the choices made by various provinces. As a Quebecker, I am not responsible for the fact that, in the 1970s, under the leadership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the federal government promoted nuclear power and oil. As I said, this was not an easy debate. The Government of Quebec could have taken the easy way out and refused to convince Quebeckers of the relevancy of hydro-electric power. By the way, René Lévesque played an extremely important role in this choice made by Quebec.
Furthermore, the federal government did not invest a single penny in the development of hydro-electricity in Quebec. Quebeckers footed the entire bill.
As I said before, as consumers, with the Borden Line, we paid for the development of the oil industry in western Canada. We also paid for our energy choice, hydroelectricity, and we should pay for the costs that it has created in the rest of Canada. We need to be extremely clear. We must ratify the Kyoto protocol and quickly agree on the sharing of costs and benefits at the jurisdictional level and certainly not at the sectorial level.
I could go on and on about oil refinery closures in Montreal in the 1970s because of the choices made by the federal government, particularly with regard to the national energy policy. However, I will stop here because I would not want to offend certain people by raising issues that may be a bit too far removed from Bill C-4.
Now, regarding the deterioration in the terms of trade, it is an extremely broad question. I mentioned earlier how the oil price shock produced what became known as petrodollars. These petrodollars were reinvested by large western banks, which made loans to third world countries without much regard for the consequences. Some of these third world countries did not make good use of this money. For example, some bought nuclear weapons or other kinds of weapons from certain western countries.
These countries found themselves in debt—and I think that we must be very clear here—at a time where, with new technologies and new economic developments, we are moving toward an economy that will rely less and less on natural resources. We are talking about the dematerialization of economic activity.
This explains why the terms of trade have deteriorated while the debt of third-world countries has increased. Canada is also a victim of that. We must realize that the decline in the Canadian dollar is due in large part to the fact that our natural resources—