Thank you, Mr. Speaker; I cannot even argue the rule at this point. When I see the minister stand in the House I see him making the same offer. He is not standing to put on record a whole bunch of Liberal Party rhetoric. He is making a very genuine request: "I ask members of the House and all Canadians to work with my government to develop an action plan".
Obviously this is an area that interests me, so I read very carefully what the Leader of the Official Opposition and the lead speaker of the Reform Party had to say. I must say I was a little disappointed in what I heard coming from the Official Opposition. When I meet with members of the Official Opposition, when I talk to members of the Official Opposition, I hear them saying some fairly progressive things about social policy. I think they have a fundamental understanding of the issue. However when I heard their leader speak he said something I have become accustomed to hearing from the New Democratic Party in my province: "Don't touch anything. Don't change anything. You dasn't muss a hair of this program". That is unfortunate because I think there is a great deal of wisdom to be shared with the House as we search for a solution to make the lives of Canadians better.
Frankly I do not know how to respond to the intervention by the Reform Party. I read it several times and made some notes on it because I was trying to figure it out. It seemed to say we have to cut everything today so we will have it tomorrow. There is a curiousness in the logic there that escapes me somewhat.
These are serious problems. They affect the lives of real people living in our communities. We have right now a tremendous opportunity. In the mid-1960s in Canada and the United States, at a time when government had huge revenues, we created the social safety net or the core of it. Some pieces were already in place. Canada has been a progressive country for a long time. We created a network of services that was the result of our best thinking at that time. We have had experience with it. We have learned over time that some of the things we did were good and that some were not so good.
We learned, for example, that a lot of the services that we provide tend not to empower people. They tend to remove their ability to function independently. We confronted that in the provision of services in a great many communities.
We have a fiscal crisis right now. If we want to look at the glass half full side of the fiscal crisis, maybe it is a good thing the crisis is forcing this debate. Maybe we will finally challenge some of our assumptions about how we provide help to people.
However let us do it from the perspective of providing some assistance.
I want to make a few quick suggestions to frame out some of the structural issues that I think confront us. Technology offers a tremendous opportunity right now. We now have the technological capacity to begin to understand what is happening out there and to look at the ways in which our services collide. Over the years we have built up a patchwork of services.
The classic case in the business of child welfare that I know best is when one calls for a consultation on a particular individual and 15 agencies show up. Obviously there is an abuse, a misuse or an inefficiency in the way in which we use the resources we have. Technology gives us some opportunities to identify that, to iron that out and to understand not the reality presented in the newspapers every day. If we read the newspapers every day we see terrible problems. In fact when we begin to look beneath the headlines at how people are doing we forget that the murder rate is going down, that people are getting healthier and that people are living longer. In fact we forget that we have succeeded enormously in the programs we have delivered.
We forget it was only a few decades ago when to be old meant to be poor, to be old meant to be living in substandard housing. Today they cannot rent out all the bachelor apartments in housing for the elderly. The elderly have now achieved, because of the programs we have created, a certain level of wealth that has allowed them to live independently. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. That is a thing to be proud of as a Canadian, not to be afraid of.
The Official Opposition presented some interesting issues about interjurisdictional areas.
The minister whom I cannot mention by name has made comment in the past that when he was a minister in a previous government between 1980 and 1984, he often spent more of his time debating interjurisdictional issues than he did debating problematic issues.
Maybe it is possible to look at the fact, for example, that the federal government delivers support to people directly. It does right now through unemployment insurance. We forget that we give support in many different ways through student aid, pensions and half the income security costs. Maybe we should look at providing a basic level of support, maybe a guaranteed annual income or a basic level of living support to people who require it. That may be a good idea. Maybe we should allow the provinces to look at the services that get added on to that to reflect local needs. It would be a very radical change. Maybe it is time we begin to think about it.
The last couple of Reform speakers mentioned the income tax system. That is an idea that is worth exploring. It is interesting there has long been a concept called negative income tax. It says that we make our tax system very progressive: when we earn money we contribute to the community, we contribute more as we earn more and when we do not have the capacity to earn for whatever reason we receive basic support. That support increases as we move further and further into difficulty. A proposal like that was put forward in the 1970s by Richard Nixon. It was very progressive. I see the member sort of struggling with it, but I think there are some aspects to it worth exploring.
I would genuinely like to see us sitting here struggling with how to make the lives of Canadians better, how to help them. The speaker before the last one said that we needed radical new ideas. I would like to hear a radical new idea from the Reform Party on how we help a million children living in poverty. I would like to hear an idea like that.
On the one hand we talk about a new form of debate, but on the other hand we have the same old kind of politics of just sitting and picking little holes in things. Let us get some radical ideas on the table. Let us make this a better country for the people.