Mr. Speaker, my friend from North Vancouver makes two excellent points.
The best way I can respond to the first point is to tell the hon. member about the three people who were facing execution by the guillotine. The rule was that if there were something wrong with the guillotine you went scot free. The first person put his head down, the blade jammed half way down and he was let go. The second person, the same thing. The third person was watching this and always wanting to be helpful he said to the executioner, "I think I know how to fix that".
If efficiency is the only objective, I can make the system very efficient for the hon. member for North Vancouver. Efficiency is not an end in itself. It must never become an end in itself in government. It must become one of the vehicles by which we get there.
If the only objective is efficiency I can tell him how to make unemployment efficient. Do not send out any cheques. All right? Just give people food stamps maybe. I can tell him how to make CPP efficient. Let us call it off. That would be the ultimate in efficiency, would it not?
Let us go to his second point of whether the examples he cites need fixing? I say to him gently we are having a debate. It was moved by the Minister of Human Resources Development, seconded by the Minister of Finance and the debate is calling on us to look at the social programs and see if they can be improved. That is to say, that debate itself, the fact that the gentleman rose in his place and moved a motion, is an acknowledgement that there is a lot wrong with the system. The hon. member for North Vancouver has given us two examples. If I had a week I could give him 10,000 others.