Madam Speaker, I have been in Canada for very close to 34 years. I started working when I was young in British Columbia, then I worked in the province of Quebec, in Montreal. In those days, the Canadian economy depended on the big traditional industries, based on our natural resources.
Our society was almost exclusively white and Christian. Drastic changes have taken place in the last 40 years, in Canada as well as in all industrial societies. Because of those changes, the present economic structure is totally different.
In fact, the whole of society has changed. Today's society is not the one that I found when I arrived in Canada. Accordingly, we must look to a sweeping reform of our entire social security net which, in some areas, has been in place for the past 50 years.
Today in North America more people are working in the computer industry than in the automobile, steel and heavy industries combined. The software industry alone represents a total output of $42 billion. More Canadians today are working in the electronic industry than in pulp and paper, our biggest industry to date. There are as many Albertans working in the financial sector today as in oil and gas.
Today, more Quebecers are working in the health technology industries than in textiles, which used to be Quebec's basic industry. There are more Americans working in the film industry today than there are in the entire automobile industry.
The tragedy of Canadian society, as indeed it is a tragedy of every industrialized country today, is that our social infrastructures, our services, have not kept up with the immense changes in our economy over the last 35 years.
The paradox is that there are jobs in the new industries but these jobs cannot be filled because the skills do not match the jobs that are open. There is a huge jobless pool of people who cannot access available jobs in new industries because of the lack of proper skills.
I represent a riding in which a great number of high tech industries are located, industries in communications, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, software and others. I have spoken to many company executives.
One company, which is highly prosperous and almost unique in the world, exports 97 per cent of its products. This company cannot find enough workers inside Canada to fill 50 per cent of its demand. Of its skilled workforce 25 per cent come from Quebec and 25 per cent come from the rest of Canada. It has to import 50 per cent of its skilled workforce from England, Germany, the United States and other places. This is not peculiar to my riding. There are similar stories all across Canada in all the new industries.
The reform we are talking about today is to empower Canadians to keep pace in this new world in which sadly there is no longer a place for school dropouts or people without suitable training. If we compare our rate of school performance with that of Germany, Japan, or Korea, of all the emerging countries where skills are at a premium and are being used day by day, we find ourselves sadly lacking.
That is why this reform is so important to us today. This reform is almost a call to Canadians to take up the challenge, to find in the reform an opportunity to reshape our collective skills so as to enable our citizens, especially our younger ones, to find a place in this very different yet very exciting world.
Today Canada will depend more and more on new technologies and new sectors, including communications, aerospace, broadcasting technologies, health technologies and indeed, the environmental technology sector.
These are our new industries, our new challenges. Tomorrow's opportunities await. And this is the attitude the Minister of Human Resources Development would like to see us adopt, one of taking responsibility for our actions, of discussing tomorrow's challenges together, so that we can build a social security system that will carry us into the 21st century.
In reviewing the options for the Axworthy reform, we have the opportunity to think about what is at stake, to face today's realities, to reflect on our 50-year old social security net, and to give Canadians, our young people in particular, confidence and dignity, in the knowledge that tomorrow's families will have lasting jobs, jobs that will make them competitive in today's competitive world.
This is what this reform is all about. The reform will most certainly have a financial impact. We can no longer afford our existing overly expensive social security net. We must think of more creative, more innovative approaches: this is the goal the minister, Mr. Axworthy, is trying to reach in his reform.
I hope this will give us all a chance to discuss in a constructive spirit this essential need to reform our social security system so as to make us competitive and give us the qualify of life for the next century we all aspire to have.