Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As we've just witnessed, I am up against a seasoned parliamentarian who can suck up all the oxygen in the room along with our seven minutes, but I will nonetheless begin with a comment reflecting one of his English remarks.
The minister says that Canada is the only industrialized country without a national securities regulator. I would point out to my colleague, the finance minister, that Canada also is the only industrialized country without a national education minister, and there's a good reason for that. It goes back way before 1935, which is the date he cites. It goes right back to the picture showing the Fathers of Confederation. We have a confederal deal in this country, and it's galling to hear the minister say it's in the spirit of cooperative federalism that he's seeking to occupy a sphere that will empty out an important part of the Quebec economy, will move a lot of experts out of the province, and won't produce any results.
All we have to do is look at what happened to the people whose money was invested with Earl Jones. He was on nobody's radar screen; he was a fraudster and was not regulated. You know where he was being spotted and tracked? It was at the Royal Bank of Canada, the Beaconsfield branch in Quebec. You know what happened? People were defrauded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and all these lovely federal structures—because the federal government is in charge of chartered banks—did nothing. There are official documents in the court record of the Earl Jones case, written by the people at the Royal Bank, the Beaconsfield branch, showing that they knew exactly what was going on. They wrote to him about it. And do you know what those people got? Zero. Do you know what the federal government did? Zero.
So instead of getting into a mode where he decides he knows how to do what the confederal deal left with the provinces since the beginning and what they know how to do, why doesn't he start taking care of the stuff that Confederation left to him, which is to take care of the chartered banks and people like Earl Jones?
Mr. Chairman, the minister is fond of across-the-board tax cuts.
The approach used by the Conservatives aims to reduce taxes for all businesses in the same way. There is, however, an obvious problem that the Minister knows well. I'm talking about the fact that, since the forest or the manufacturing industry made no profits and had not, consequently, paid taxes, they could not benefit from the tens of billions of dollars in across-the-board tax cuts that the government granted.
I would like the Minister to share his thoughts with us and to tell us whether he has changed his mind. I want to know if he is beginning to realize that building a diverse and balanced economy, something we have been working on diligently since the Second World War, has required a visionary government that appreciates the sheer size of the country and the need to focus on sectors that are more productive, create more jobs and are more future-oriented, such as the environment? Or will he keep limiting his across-the-board tax reduction strategy to the biggest, most profitable companies.