Mr. Speaker, we are beginning to agree. The approach that the member for Trois-Rivières just suggested is essentially what I was trying to communicate in my remarks.
As the minister said, we need to develop a strategic approach and that is what we are attempting to do. We cannot just look at these difficulties in isolation from the work that the minister of human resources is doing. It cannot be looked at in isolation from what the industry committee is doing or what the Minister of the Environment is doing.
In my view we have not spent enough time today talking about the potential in environmental technologies. We must become a nation that measures its strength not by its armaments but by our environmental technologies. That is an area where I think most people would agree there is terrific potential.
There is another thing, a final point I want to make. This is actually a plug. On May 17 a group of members of Parliament from both sides of the house, 10 of us, are going to Beijing with people from over 100 small and medium sized businesses, not the big businesses that tend to go on these missions. We will be looking for new markets, new opportunities.
We all know that the Asia-Pacific region is just exploding with opportunity especially for small and medium sized business. There might be all kinds of opportunity for people who are currently in the conversion process and looking to that region of the world for new markets and new potential.
As the Minister of Industry said earlier this morning, it has to be a comprehensive approach. We have to get the financial institutions on side. The Export Development Corporation has to be working. The human resource component is helping people get retrained for the new economy. We have to beef up our ability to go out and sell abroad. We are not very good hustlers in this country. We tend to be staid. We are not as aggressive as some of our American friends to the south or the Germans or the French. One of the things that we as parliamentarians have to do is encourage our small and medium size business community to hustle a little more beyond the boundaries of Canada.
I realize I only have a minute, but that is something that we as members of Parliament can do to support the small and medium size business sector. We go with them.
The only problem that I have is that members of the Reform Party do not want to come with us when we take these small and medium size business people on these trips to try and forge new markets because they do not think these trips are that productive. However, I hope eventually they will see that they are very important to the small business community and they are not junkets.