Mr. Speaker, I am happy to answer that question and actually another one that came to my mind as the member from Edmonton was speaking.
Essentially, as I view the world I see the words competitive and efficiencies working hand in hand. A competitive economy or an efficient economy are one and the same thing.
To me, and more importantly as I look at the whole country, when the country or the world looks at an efficient economy it sees an economy that will produce wealth that can be redistributed to ensure that all members of that particular area will be able to benefit from that increased wealth.
An efficient economy produces jobs. The world economy today is not increasing jobs. The OECD countries are all exhibiting unemployment rates from 7 per cent to 30 per cent. Those sorts of numbers tell us that we are not a very efficient economy.
One of the things that I had hoped to indicate in my remarks while I had the floor but was unable to because of time dealt with the matter of trade and the environment. I wanted to indicate in answer to this question that I believe that trade and the environment are also very much linked. When we look to the future of the world and the carrying capacity of the earth it is very easy to see that our task as leaders on this earth is to ensure that we plan far enough ahead to ensure that our grandchildren will be able to
survive on this planet without eating foods made from artificial substances.
Currently when we look at GATT planning documents we see that these leaders are predicting declines in employment for many sectors of the existing economy. High on that list scheduled for future unemployment are our farmers, agricultural workers, textile workers and office clerks. From that list it would appear that the GATT planners seem to be expecting us to go hungry with no clothes on our backs, without any information from people who are supposed to collect it for us.
With world populations increasing the way they are, surely this is absolute nonsense. Canada's leaders should be looking at building an efficient economy that produces wealth to ensure that Canadians have the jobs to be able to compete with those in the rest of the world.