Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise in my place today to enter the debate on Bill C-46 respecting the establishment of the Department of Industry.
I notice part of the bill deals with the abolition of Investment Canada. I would like to address that point to some extent. Investment Canada in the new establishment will be basically a directorate within the Department of Industry. Investment Canada goes back to the original FIRA or the Foreign Investment Review Agency.
Unfortunately over our history Canadians have taken the fast track to economic prosperity. By this I mean we have borrowed capital from outside our borders. In fact, we have even allowed industry to come into our country and take over various sections of our economy. We have done that rather than develop our economy in our own sense. In other words, we have developed the aspect of letting others do it.
The problems which existed with FIRA and go back to the 1970s are really no different today. I question those who are in attendance today. The cars we drive, the televisions we watch and the household appliances we use are either purchased outside of our borders, manufactured outside of our borders or they are made by companies within our borders but which are not headquartered here.
This higher standard of living we have tried to attract has come with a price for all Canadians. There is a greater and greater dependency on foreign capital, much like a drug user who cannot kick the habit. With respect to our governments, 25 per cent of the financing of our federal debt is outside of our borders and 40 per cent of the financing of provincial government debts is outside of our borders.
This has created a dependency relationship. We are beholden to the people who own and control this money. We have a tendency to service the markets of our creditors. In fact we service the market of our major creditor, the United States, with raw materials and raw resources.
Canada has a trade surplus which is very attractive when one looks at it initially. In reality Canada has a trade surplus with only one country in the world and a trade deficit with almost all other nations. Canada has a trade surplus with the United States and trade deficits, especially with southeast Asia for those television sets and appliances we use every day.
This concept of letting others do it has caused a great retardation of our research and development. Why do I say that? Well why should we have laboratories in Canada? Why should we do research in Canada when there are laboratories south of the border in Seattle and North Carolina? In other words, there seems to be no real desire in Canada to do genuine research and development.
I do not have to tell anyone that statistics on the Canadian economy indicate our research and development is one of the lowest in the world. This has had a tremendous impact on the creation of high paying, high skilled jobs in Canada. The partial result of some of this is that some of our best brains have had to go south in order to utilize their talents. Do we want to continue with this kind of process where our smarter people have to leave?
I do not have to tell you that research and development has a tremendous importance on the new economy. The economy is changing before our very eyes. The world and global economies are changing before our very eyes. Another impact of foreign investment and foreign ownership and control in Canada has been job training.
Canada has one of the poorest records on in house training in the world. I question why this should be. Why is this unique to Canada? I suspect we can trace it back to that original problem, foreign ownership and foreign control. Why train high echelon management type jobs when we already have a set up to do that south of the border? This has worked against the best interests of Canadian workers.
The ultimate price of letting others do it has been that decisions are not made within our borders, decisions that affect our economy on a day to day basis, decisions that affect industry and industry formation. It continues to this day. Directions and suggestions of local managers are routinely overridden by corporate headquarters often located to the south but in other countries as well. This stifles innovation in our economy. It stifles the ability of people to progress in this society. It does not matter whether you are in Quebec or any other part of the country, the story is still the same.
This brings us to where we are today. Today the economy is changing. Like the devastation that wrenched Japan in the second world war, or the industrial revolution that swept across Britain, things have changed. We have wiped the slate clear. A new economy is before us. We have changed the way we do business.
The integrated multinational is no longer the productive engine of the economy. Smokestacks in industrial areas in the United States and other countries are slowly going dormant. A whole section of the northern United States is now referred to as the rust belt. These industries are no longer viable. These are industries which for whatever reason are not part of the new technology. States like New York face outward migration; people are actually leaving some of these huge engines of production.
Now is the chance for Canada to regain its ability to make its own decisions. This is an opportunity to actually make a change to the new economy without forfeiting our standard of living. In other words, we have to start being smarter. We have to start doing our own research and development. We are all equals now in the world. Canada has an opportune chance to be part of a new and evolving economy.
The concepts in previous years of why Canada could not be an effective industrial power-which, of course, it is to some extent, but not nearly as much as it could be-has been that we have a huge land mass and a small population base. I do not have to tell you that with the technology before us this is no longer important. All of Canada can be connected in one room through the information highway. In other words, it is possible to service our domestic markets and create industries that will be effective in competing with others throughout the world. We need to grab on to that technology.
We need to service our own markets effectively and also attack those which exist around the world. To do this we need a new partnership with government, business and labour. These three sectors must rethink their traditional roles. Government must be the one which steers. By that I mean it must be an adjudicator of the marketplace. It ensures that competition continues. It keeps taxes low and fosters this new competition. It gives incentives to new training and job creation. It also must assist us in attacking those new and evolving markets, like southeast Asia.
We need a national education standard. This is also part of the federal government's obligation. Business has been too slow in this country to adapt to the new technology. Some of our business practices are outmoded and parochial.
We need to do more business networking. We need to create strategic alliances within our business sector so they will go out and attack those new markets. They must be unified to spike the market share. Labour must end its adversarial attitude toward business and government. It must see itself as a true partner. It must realize that new jobs and the creation of new jobs will rely
on those who do not feel alienated from the process, to those who will make a contribution to the process of industrialization. In other words, we need a new and genuine partnership of the three engines of the economy: government, business and labour.
These are the challenges; to seize the opportunities before us to control our destiny and to march into the 21st century certain of our future.