Mr. Speaker, I make my apologies to you and to members present.
The motion today deals with confederation and we have heard a good deal of criticism about that form of government. Confederation it seems to me is a form of government which has developed particularly in North America, here and in the United States, as a very effective and powerful way of dealing with large and diverse countries. Overall, and I think members opposite will agree with this point, the method has been very effective in North America. We have produced two nations that have been among the most productive, however you define
productive, economically or in some other terms, socially for example, that have ever existed on the face of the earth.
In a debate like this, one could tend to forget the strengths of confederation. If I could give one example, one strength of the confederate approach to government is the fact that a process of trial and error can go on in different parts of the confederation and that process is a very creative and, I would suggest in the light of the comments this morning, also a very economical way of testing new ideas. Sometimes those ideas will work and they can be taken on by the confederation or sometimes they will not work and we will have saved the expense of a trial which would have failed across the nation as a whole.
A famous example is medicare being developed in Saskatchewan. Their system of medical health support was developed, it was tried, a substantial trial and error process, and then we were able to spread it to the rest of the country.
Another example is the work that is going on in New Brunswick in the area of our social support systems which were discussed this morning. In New Brunswick as we speak experiments are going on which look as though they will show that there are better ways to deliver the social services which are so important to our nation. In a debate like this the strengths of Confederation must be stressed as well as some of the weaknesses.
It seems to me that in a form of government like this there are inevitably overlaps. Some of them for a while are necessary and many of them are unnecessary. To that extent I agree with members opposite.
Wherever there is unnecessary duplication we must eliminate it and, as the President of the Treasury Board said, I hope the government is doing so.
Simply to recite things like fisheries, agriculture or environment and then point to the fact that those things are dealt with by two jurisdictions is not to show unnecessary duplication. It seems to me fisheries would be a good example. The fishery in Quebec would be very different from the fishery in British Columbia. It therefore seems appropriate that people who understand those fisheries deal with them in those regions. But it is equally appropriate that national and international aspects of the fishery be dealt with economically and without unnecessary duplication by a central government.
What has been lacking has been national leadership, proper leadership from this Chamber. The duplication which has arisen has been a result of that, not the result of a weakness in confederation but a weakness of previous governments to address the truly national issues.