Mr. Speaker, this is my first time to rise and speak on the floor.
I would like to congratulate you on your appointment. I look forward to working with you. I would like to congratulate everyone here for being elected. Obviously constituents felt that members were worthy of that trust and have sent them here.
I would like to apologize to the members across the floor from the Bloc Quebec for not speaking to them in French. It is a sign of respect. I am afraid I do not have the confidence quite yet to attempt to do it. Never mind, I will be doing it soon.
My riding is Vancouver Centre. I do not want to go into the geographical and regional description of Vancouver Centre. What I want to tell members about Vancouver Centre is that it is a microcosm of Canada.
Vancouver Centre represents on the one hand some of the wealthiest people in this country. On the other hand, it represents people who live in abject poverty in one-room hotels in the middle of the riding. I therefore feel that I can speak with some authority on the problems that we are facing today in terms of our economic and social problems.
The reason I lump both of those into one is that they are not single problems. We cannot in any way remove or separate the problem of economic disorder that we have in our country from the problem of looking at our social programs. They are totally and completely interdependent.
A strong social program-I do not like to use the words safety net-a strong sense of social responsibility is very important if we are to look at economic growth. Unemployment has a major impact on our ability to gain revenue. Unemployment drains our coffers of money that we pay for unemployment insurance.
When unemployment insurance expires, our coffers are further drained by helping people who are on welfare. On the other hand, if we have people working and contributing they contribute to the wealth of this country not only economically but in terms of their self-esteem.
I am a family physician and I have yet to meet, in fact the number of people I know is very small who want to stay on welfare and who want to be unemployed. People want to work. It has everything to do not just with money but with self-esteem, a sense of self-worth and a sense of contributing to the growth and future of our country. This is why we cannot separate these two issues.
I would like to speak to the motion because I believe that the motion made by the hon. Minister of Human Resources Development is a very important one. I do not understand how we
could be debating it at all. We should all be saying that we agree with it.
Really all the motion is asking is for us to look at ways in which we could change, modernize and up-date our social system. This needs to happen. We cannot have an inflexible system. We are moving into the 21st century. Our needs have changed. Our economic way of living has changed. We need to look at how we do things to make them not only more efficient but more applicable to the needs of the people and more cost effective.
It does not mean that we are talking about cutting programs. We are talking about making them more efficient. The minister has invited not only all of the members across the floor in both opposition parties, but he has invited the people of Canada, the provinces, the municipalities and non-governmental organizations to work together to find that common ground.
It is not a coincidence that the Liberal Party was elected with a specific mandate to find that common ground. Nor is it a coincidence that when we put our red book forward it contained a total package of a plan for the future of this country. It is in fact because of a strong Liberal tradition and heritage that the Liberal Party has recognized the need for a socially responsible society.
Socially responsible means allowing people the dignity of working, as the Prime Minister has said so often, and allowing them to do so by giving them the skills to enable them to get to that position.
There are always going to be people in our country who will not be able to realize their full potential by working. We will always have among us people who will be disabled in some way. That is the social safety net. However the ability to bring people into realizing their full potential is the Liberal way. That is what this motion does.
This motion speaks to making our system more applicable and more able to move us further into the 21st century so that Canadians can become strongly independent people, recognizing their full potential and able to contribute to this country. That is all the motion states.
The debates I hear are pre-empting the results of that kind of consultation around this country. They have pre-empted it. That is one of the problems that people have always had with our political system. We have never allowed a process of consultation to work. We sit and indulge in rhetoric. We score points on each other by trying to say that this is what we are going to be doing and what we are not going to be doing.
The motion is clear. It asks for our co-operation and our commitment to looking at how we change our system. It asks no more than that. It is a promise that the Liberal government made. It is a promise in the red book. Everyone has heard about the red book. It is not a magic book. It has not some wondrous tone that one has to have a Ph.D. in literature to understand. It is a simple articulation of the core value of the Canadian people, which is what we and our Prime Minister seem to have been able to articulate very well.
It has been two years in the making. We consulted not just with Liberals but with people all across the country and around the world regardless of their political stripe. We brought them in to talk about the need for change, to look at not changing the bottom line, which is a strong sense of fiscal discipline together with social responsibility, but how we can do that differently.
It is obvious that the old ways have not worked. It is obvious that the solutions we used in the past were useless. We are saying: "Let us work together to change this, to make it different".
I do not even know why we are debating this motion, hon. colleagues across the floor and within my own party. It is obvious to me that it is the only course of action we must take. What I would like to ask of members instead is that they come together with us in this endeavour, that they co-operate, that they help to consult and that they help to make the difference.
People have elected us for change. They have elected all of us, the Reform Party and the Liberal Party across Canada, to help move this country forward so that we can be globally competitive and that our individual Canadians can be independent. That is what we would like members to do. Let us do it together so that we can create a country that we can all, regardless of our political stripe, be proud of.