Mr. Speaker, this is going to be a very short intervention to reply to some of the nonsense I have heard today in the debate.
The debate has focused on what culture means to a society and to a nation. I have come to the conclusion there is very little understanding on the other side of the House when they can ask how many gallons of paint does a painting take to determine the worth of the painting.
I had the privilege and the pleasure this morning of being at breakfast with the director of the National Gallery. We were talking about "Voice of Fire". We were talking about other things too. Next year, and I am sure members opposite are not aware of this, is the 75th anniversary of the Group of Seven. I asked the director of the gallery what she thought the media reports would have been about and the outraged comments of the House of Commons would have been at the time our National Gallery was purchasing paintings of the Group of Seven, when the popular taste was pastoral landscapes in the European style. Those purchases were very unpopular and yet what is one of our great Canadian icons? The Group of Seven.
A gallery that was independent of political control 75 years ago had the foresight to recognize something uniquely Canadian in the style of Canada, something not based on imitating what was being done elsewhere.
I am not qualified to judge "Voice of Fire". I really do not know if that is the kind of painting that 75 years from now we will be extremely proud to have had the foresight to buy and have in our national collection. I hope so. I do not know.
I do know that I want a gallery that is free to buy what it believes is the best being produced. I thank the gallery for having fulfilled that role and for having preserved for us something as uniquely Canadian and valuable as the paintings of the Group of Seven, among others.
I want to make another comment. We have heard about multiculturalism today as if all it does is support cultures that are unique to specific groups. What in fact it does is build understanding among Canadians.
Members on the opposite side have demonstrated that they really do not know a lot about what they are saying because they consistently talk about certain ethnic groups which do not rely on government funding not being aware obviously that in fact those groups do rely on government funding and are quite competent in getting it.
Let me report another incident recently. I attended an award ceremony at the Boys and Girls Club in my riding not too long ago. It was a wrap up of their summer program. I saw young people whose families have been in Canada for generations and whose skins are white. I also saw young people whose families have been in Canada for less than six months, Somalians, Ethiopians, people from southeast Asia, people from all over the world playing together, working together, and getting to know each other.
I know that many of those Somalia youths are involved in the community to the extent that they are because of organizations like the Somali integration and settlement agency, which gets funding from the very program that the members opposite are criticizing.
They get funding because they are coming here as refugees. They have left everything behind. The majority are women with young children coming here for safety. These people do not come here with a lot. This agency gives these people coming to our country job training, language training, access to services so they have the ability not to separate themselves, but to integrate more fully and more completely into Canadian society. One of the results of that is young Somalian, Ethiopian and Cambodian children and children from all over the world I see playing together at the Boys and Girls Club in my riding.
I want to say one final word about special interest groups. The people who talk about special interest groups frankly are the biggest special interest group in the country. They are the ones who by tradition and by the practice of all our laws, our courts and all our systems are the privileged class.
If we fund certain groups in our society it is because without government support the poorest, the disabled, women, children would not have a voice in our public debate. I do not want a public debate on public issues on the future of this country that is dominated only by those who already have the wealth to make their voices heard.
I do not want the decisions we make in the House made on the basis only of opinions from those who can afford to travel to Ottawa, to write to Ottawa, to hire lobbyists, to hire lawyers and to hire accountants. I want the voices of all Canadians to be part of what we decide in the House, what we determine in our committees and what the future of Canadian society is. Canadian society is not just for the privileged few; it is for all Canadians.