Mr. Speaker, I wish to congratulate my colleague for her presentation, which could not be any clearer or more interesting.
With regard to her quote from the red book about culture being really important, why did the Liberal government not take this opportunity to establish a department that could have been
called something other than the Department of Canadian Heritage? I, for one, would have called it the department of tutti frutti, since it includes a little of everything whether or not it belongs there. So why not give us a department other than this one?
Why did the Liberal government not take this opportunity to do the right thing? When they were in opposition, they criticized the Conservatives for creating such a department; now that they are in office, they do the exact same thing the tories did.
How is it possible, now that the information highway is just around the corner, that no mechanism has been provided for in the Department of Canadian Heritage to deal with this subject, that there is no regulatory power over the information highway, that telecommunications remain separate from communications, that the CRTC will continue to be split between culture and industry, and that we will never be able to resolve copyright issues because this government lacks courage once again and does what others did before it? It must go back to the drawing board. How can they justify this according to the Liberal party's philosophy? I wonder.