Mr. Speaker, on the day after the Academy Awards the remarks of the hon. member opposite are interesting in the sense that they were very flashy. It was a good performance.
I tried to follow his logic. I had problems listening to the litany of events historically and of statistics quoted by him in the early part of his speech which he attributes to the repercussions on job creation. Like most members of the party opposite he always refers to Canada and Quebec.
I have a question but I want to draw an analogy first. I live in a border riding not far from the city of Detroit. In the late 1960s we saw in Detroit the rise of the city state, a city at that time of some six million people, not unlike the province of Quebec in terms of population. In the late 1960s we saw the rise of a certain economic pride in the black community. We saw the rise of a saviour by the name of Mr. Coleman Young who became the mayor of Detroit. Mr. Young promised the people of Detroit that he would lead them out of the wilderness into some sort of economic nirvana.
In 1993 Mr. Coleman Young decided he would not run again; at 75 years of age he had had it. At the same time we find that the population of Detroit has declined. The economic base has declined and I ask the simple question why. It was the so-called city state, this type of nationalism that arose in that city that killed business. In fact development did occur in the state of Michigan. It did occur in the United States but it did not occur in Detroit because of the economic policies of that city.
Using the analogy that there is a certain element of nationalism, much like in the city state of Detroit in the late 1960s, will this have a repercussion on job creation, the 465,000 people he claims to be unemployed in the province of Quebec-I do not dispute that number-and are the policies of his party also not contributing to that uncertainty, the creation of the mentality that nobody wants to invest in the province of Quebec because of the policies put forward by his party?