Madam Speaker, I want first to thank the member for Halifax for her efforts to speak French.
[Translation]
I know that the member has a lot of experience in this House. When she was in the opposition, I heard her talking about the Atlantic development agency. Besides, I was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry, Science and Technology when the act on that department was voted on, and I remember there were a lot of criticism of what was done.
The government has now been in power for six months. Today, in order to justify the work done by her government, the parliamentary secretary gives us a list of businesses which received grants, obviously before her government came into office.
However, I am happy to see that she thinks that having a regional development agency for Atlantic Canada is a good decision taken by the Conservatives because Canada is becoming more and more a country of economic regions where the market trends are more and more south-north and north-south than east-west.
However, I have to admit that nothing was said about Hibernia. This is incredible. If we were to put in the bank all the money spent on Hibernia, we would have enough money for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency for the next 100 years. We would get hundreds of millions each year in interest alone on the money we are going to waste. What is the government doing? Nothing. We are wasting billions of dollars for something which has no viable future. It is unbelievable.
The parliamentary secretary is telling us about duplication and overlapping. She should thank Quebec for putting this on the agenda and making it a major issue. Clearly, in the years to come we will be less and less able to afford duplication and overlapping between the federal and provincial governments.
Those who wish to stay within Canada can try to come to an agreement with the federal government to limit duplication. However, when we talk about harmonizing it means that someone has decided to harmonize as he or she sees fit. That is exactly what the federal government is doing with respect to manpower despite the fact that, in Quebec, all stakeholders have agreed that Quebec should be responsible for manpower training.
However, the federal government has been refusing for years. We are promised agreement after agreement, but nothing ever comes about. What the government is seeking is not harmonization but centralization. Yet, we know that in order to have endogenous development in the regions they need resources. They need to have, locally, the right, the power, and the capacity to undertake projects without the federal big brother who thinks he can always do better than anyone else. This is the problem in this country.
If the Liberal point of view had a purpose, with the huge amount of money invested in the Maritimes, this would be heaven on earth. The role of the federal government in regional development has a purpose.