Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak about Bill C-64 dealing with employment equity.
Equity is one of the most important things that Canadians should, and I believe do, stand for. However, there is a major difference between the equity being proposed by the government and the equity Canadians would like to see.
I think back to the pioneer days and the days the west was developed because I am from St. Albert just outside Edmonton. Equity back in those days was opportunity. If we are going to talk about equity we should always talk about opportunity rather than results. Tens of thousands of people came to this country, and still do, for the opportunity to succeed, the opportunity to prosper and the opportunity to make the mark that would have been denied them in other countries. That is the type of equity I believe Canadians want.
Through the hard work of pioneers, they built a country of which we are proud. They built a country that recognizes the equality of all our citizens. That is one of the great platforms of the Reform Party. It says we are not into hyphenated Canadians. There is only one kind of Canadian and that is the ordinary Canadian who works hard and makes the country work.
A letter on employment equity appeared in the Edmonton Journal a few weeks ago. In some ways one might think it superficially drew the situation out to the extreme. It talked about the hypothetical situation of an Olympics with men and women being equal. Of course 51 per cent of race winners would have to be women and 49 per cent men. How would that be achieved? By putting weights on the legs of the men and so on. While the point is ridiculous there is a moral to this story. To have equality of results, somebody has to be penalized. That is the point I want to drive home. To have equality of results the obvious winners have to be penalized in order to allow others to win their share.
Our position is that rather than penalize the winners, we should do our best to give everybody the opportunity to win through education. It is education that determines whether or not someone is going to succeed. It is not because they are black or white, or male or female, or handicapped or crippled, or whatever. The point is if they are educated they have a chance to succeed.
Last week, a study was released which indicated that of the top 10 per cent of income earners in this country the vast majority attributed education to their success, not who they were, not what they were, not their family background, not whether they came from a rich background. Education was the dominant factor which determined whether they were able to succeed or not. That is why the House should focus on making sure people have the opportuni-
ty to succeed through education, not by introducing quotas that will penalize those who have the desire to succeed, those who have the willingness to work hard to succeed, those who go far beyond the others and want to succeed. Why hold them back? Unfortunately that is the nature of the government's way of doing things.
We want to ensure we can get back to the days where hard work is equal to prosperity rather than having it guaranteed by government legislation.
If failure is to be eliminated, as this legislation tries to do in many ways, it comes at a cost. The cost of eliminating failure is equal to the price of success. If we do not let some people succeed because we want no one to fail, then we will bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. We saw what happened in eastern Europe in Russia. They refused to allow anyone to succeed and the whole country failed.
While this legislation is but one small piece along that road, Reform Party members feel that Canadians will be far better pleased and a lot more confident that this country can dig itself out of the hole if those who have the will to succeed are allowed to move ahead and help the rest of us and to provide education to those who need to get their feet on the ladder.
I have a constituent who has been in to see me several times. He would like to be a Mountie. In the west the Mounties are a revered police institution. Everybody knows the Mounties. They are known throughout the world as that great Canadian police force. They are recognized and revered around the world.
This constituent wants to be a Mountie. Every year he does 600 hours of volunteer police work with the RCMP. He sat the exams and met the minimum standards. He has a university education. The only thing that stops him from being a Mountie is the fact that he is a white male. Other family members are in the force. He would dearly love to be in the force but because he is a white male he cannot be what he dreams to be. That is because this government brings in what it calls targets, which I call quotas, and denies someone who would be a first class policeman. We have denied him his dream.
That is why we have to recognize that this legislation is out to lunch and the fact that we need to build people up, not hold them down.
This past week while we have been away I attended three graduation ceremonies in my riding. At a couple of them I presented the Governor General's award. I had an opportunity to talk to people about education. I cannot encourage them enough because in this complex and technological age we live in we need all the education we can get.
If we tell people that it does not matter how much education you have, how much motivation you have, how much will you have to succeed because you just happen to be in the wrong category, then we are sending the wrong message to young people and we have received the wrong message from the people who built this country. In many ways that is part of the reason we are so far in debt. We have lost our way and that is a great shame.
In an earlier debate the member from Beaver River talked about the fact that this legislation is going to be forced on businesses, forced on the civil service, but the House of Commons is exempt. Why would the House of Commons be exempt? Why would we in typical fashion tell the people to not do as we do but just do as we say?
This is why the Reform Party is totally opposed to this legislation. I would gladly support anything the government would do to ensure that education became the reason for equity.