Mr. Speaker, for the last half hour or so I listened to presentations by two members of the Reform Party. I am reminded of a movie I saw recently called "The Madness of King George". We have heard a version of paranoid economics where there is a hobgoblin behind every bush and a shadow behind every budget. It reminds me very much of King George who suffered from a similar malady. He would find himself very much at home in the present day Reform caucus.
There is an interesting scene in that movie that I think is worth commenting on. James Fox, leader of the opposition at that time, was seen strolling along the lawns of Westminster with Mr. Pitt, who at the time was prime minister. He was a somewhat straight-laced and dour gentleman according to history; that certainly was how he was portrayed in the movie. As they were walking along, James Fox said to the prime minister: "Mr. Pitt, is there anything you admire at all?" Mr. Pitt said: "A balance sheet, Mr. Fox. I like a good balance sheet".
Mr. Pitt would be very happy with our Minister of Finance today because he has come up with a good balance sheet. He has been able to come up with a balance sheet to escape the malady and the problems faced by governments over the past decade that have promised much and delivered little. He has come up with a balance sheet that has now been acknowledged and recognized by financial markets both here and internationally as meeting the test of restoring integrity in our fiscal system.
A few short days ago the leader of the Reform Party, the chicken little of Canadian politics, screamed that the sky was going to fall and that the clouds were going to roll in? All of a sudden comes the budget and interest rates begin to fall, the dollar stabilizes and financial markets say that the government has met the test.
Not to be daunted by that illusion, he must now find himself a new form of vapour to chase after. He is now pretending there is "a hidden agenda". The only hidden agenda is the one we recently read about in the book about the Reform Party that says the hidden agenda of the hon. member for Calgary Southwest is to rule the world.
The message of the budget is to get beyond the immediate and the superficial, as we have heard this afternoon. We must deal with the specifics and put aside some of the grand statements of moral indignation we hear coming from certain provincial premiers such as: "woe is me, the world is gone" and get down to what the government is attempting to do.
It has provided in this budget the first major step in restructuring the economy of this country to provide a way of ensuring a fiscal, economic and monetary system that prepares us and gives us the kind of foundation we need upon which we can then begin to build a new social reform, a new system of cultural programs to provide certainty and stability to Canada, on which we can then begin to build the new Canada and the new economy. That is what this budget is all about.
It is very important to emphasize that modernization, re-engineering and restructuring are not the object of one day or one week. They must start and must continue. It is going to be work that I certainly believe will engage members of Parliament from
our side of the House and I hope it will engage members of Parliament from all sides of the House.
This is what Canadians want and demand. They do not want the kind of voodoo analysis we are constantly hearing. They simply want people to quit playing with black magic and get down to reality and deal with the real issues such as how to maintain a balance of programs and begin to respond to the transformations in the workplace and in the global economy, how we preserve integrity economically and socially and the sovereignty in order to make our own decisions.
Clearly the statement has been made. As much as we have the fulmination of the Reform Party wishing it were otherwise, wishing and hoping that the sky had fallen as its leader predicted, hoping that there would be a cataclysm in Canada, that catastrophe would be visited upon us, as much as it has been urging and praying that the sky would fall, it has not.
What is happening is that Canadians and people internationally have seen that this government is the best economic manager this country has had in a long time.
That is why every Canadian has a crucial stake in the budget we brought forward. The government moved decisively to restore our nation's integrity and is now beginning to put us in a position where we can do the real work of rebuilding we were elected to do. We had to get the economics right and the Minister of Finance has accomplished that.
We want to maintain the social safety net offered by programs like old age pension, family allowance and welfare. It is absolutely essential that our financial house be put in order. We will take any action necessary to protect social programs today and in the future.
I want to illustrate to members in the House and others listening exactly how that budget has been the catalyst to begin that reformation, that new resolution of programs and developments in our country.
In the budget we announced that we were going to fundamentally reorganize the funding of programs in the very large Department of Human Resources Development to bring together, as we heard during the course of the committee hearings, a new human resources investment fund so that we could consolidate a number of existing programs that may have had value at one time but no longer had the same relevance or the same impact. We wanted to bring them together into a common pool so we could begin to organize a new social reform package.
When hon. members opposite ask where the social reform is, it is happening now. The member from Calgary when she made her presentation on behalf of her party said: "I apologize. It was not all that well thought out because I did not have much time".
We have a plan. The human resource investment fund is the beginning of that because it now gives us the flexibility to put in place a good child care program in this country, to deal with the question of literacy with our partners in the provinces, to begin working on new approaches to help people get re-employed, to sit down with the private sector as we are doing in something like 16 human resource councils in things like electronics, tourism, horticulture, logistics, car repair and auto parts.
We are now putting in place a partnership with business and labour in each of these sectors to start new training for young people. Since the summer close to 10,000 young people have been enrolled in these new internship programs in which we are sharing our resources with the private sector to begin providing new job opportunities and training opportunities.
It is not the old jurisdictional wars between federal and provincial governments. We are getting away from the old turf disputes. We are now sitting down with the private sector and community sector, the women's resource centres, the YWCA, the local communities and asking how to become partners to get people trained.
I heard from one of the Reform members "too little too late". That is coming from a party which said it was going to take the unemployment insurance fund and rip up all programs for women with children in the unemployment insurance program. He says we are too little too late. Talk about taking a dagger to the heart of the vampire. The vampire is taking the dagger to the heart of the Canadian people. That is what is going on.
Those kind of partnerships are now going to be facilitated by this kind of reorganization. The single drawer we have now put in place, which we promised to do when I stood in this House for social reform and said the first major initiative is to put a single drawer of financing in this federal department so we could being to work out these new partnerships. It has happened in this budget and social reform is well under way.
Let me talk for a minute about the Canada social transfer. There have been a lot of balloons and a lot of assumptions made about what is being proposed. Basically what we are proposing in this particular area is to ensure the continuation of an effective national approach for the funding and support of social initiatives by developing a new set of partnerships with the provinces.
We are proposing to do exactly what every single province has been asking us to do, to ensure they could have the flexibility to provide innovation and new approaches, to allow the provinces to become incubators of good social reform. That kind of freedom has been on every single premier's list until we do it.
Then they say: "Oh, God, the devil made us do it. Please do not do it to us".
Do they want the responsibility or not? We have given them the responsibility and for those who have said for some reason or other that this means there is going to be a withdrawal of the federal government from responsibilities, that is not the case.
Every member of the House knows that the present program, the existing program, is the one that creates the problems. Because it was designed 30 years ago it really means that in most cases there is no conditionality. There are no common principles. There are no standards. We simply write the cheques and they make the decisions.
As a result we have created in many cases large numbers of bureaucracies that have chewed up the money not in delivering directly to people but simply providing services for themselves.
I am most surprised by the objection of Bloc Quebecois on this matter because it is the one party which I thought would endorse fully a new system of federalism that would allow provinces to make more decisions for themselves.
The budget lays the foundations of a new federalism, a new partnership with the provinces and communities. At present, we have a government organization that has remained unchanged since the 1930s and 1940s; it is too centralized, too heavy and far from meeting the needs of the people.
The provinces, and Quebec in particular, have been asking that changes be made for quite some time. What the new Canadian social transfer will give the provinces is flexibility and the power to make decisions, less paperwork, yet better results.
What we are basically trying to do is ensure that we would still maintain very clearly the commitments under the Canada Health Act. We still maintain very clearly in the budget papers the responsibility to maintain full mobility. We will sit down with the provinces over the next year to work out a new framework in which we can provide more coherence to our programs, provide more co-ordination of what they are doing among themselves and with us so we can begin to tackle the high priority that Canadians have placed to deal with things like child poverty and to deal with the problems of families.
For the first time as the federal government we are saying let us sit down as equals to work out how we can bring all our resources together in a new way to provide a new framework for social reform.
Again, when members opposite and others say that social reform is on the shelf, they have not read the budget. It started Monday night with a brand new way of working with the provinces to bring about social reform in a collective, co-ordinated, co-operative community way which is what Canadians want. That is what the Canadian social transfer is all about.
I issue an invitation to all members of this House. It is going to be absolutely essential and important that every member representing all the regions be prepared to put forward those kinds of proposals and ideas about how they can see this new Canadian social framework taking place, the kind of priorities that are there, where we allocate the money and to encourage and endorse in their own provinces and their own regions the willingness of the provinces to come to the table.
I was encouraged this morning to hear Roy Romanow, the premier of Saskatchewan, say that we are going to sit down and talk with the provinces, to watch the kind of courage expressed by Clyde Wells, the premier of Newfoundland, last night on television when he said: "Sure, we're the poorest province in the country but we realize the federal government had to take tough steps and we're prepared to sit down and work with them".
The proposal, for example, in Newfoundland for the new income security proposal looking at a way of providing income supplements to top up basic benefits to encourage people to go back to work is one of those ideas that we can work together on, that we can come together with the province of Newfoundland and other provinces that want to engage in that same kind of joint enterprise to provide more work and more incentives for people to go back to work to restore their sense of dignity and their sense of hope. I applaud Premier Wells for the kind of initiative he has taken.
It is important that we get this right and not engage in the vocabulary and the language of old Canada, to talk about the way things used to be which I hear too many doing and by equating social reform with the amount of dollars that we spend. I heard members in the opposition today standing up saying we are going to take this money and the provinces do not have as much.
Have they never considered that by changing that program we will put an entirely new regime in place where we do not have to have duplicating bureaucracy, where we do not have to waste money on people pushing paper, where we do not have to have people stumbling over one another to administer the same program? What we can begin to do is save money that we can recycle and restore back directly to people by getting rid of the superstructure and infrastructure built up over the years. That is the key point.
This is not only a way of bringing down the expenses of government but also making it more efficient, more effective, more competent and more relevant to the people who really need help and support. That is what this budget is about.
Let me for the moments remaining speak of a third initiative that emerges directly out of the budget in terms of undertaking the kind of reform of our social network that we want to initiate. That is proposals to look at the unemployment insurance system or, to frankly use the term that the Prime Minister used, an employment insurance program, to retool, redesign the program as a way of enabling people to get back to work, which is the fundamental mandate we received as a government.
That means taking a program which over the years has allowed or acquired a certain number of disincentives that discourage people from working, that provide alternatives to working, that do not provide the resources to get the kinds of skills and the training required to meet the kinds of new challenges in our economy.
It is fascinating to see how many good ideas are out there. This country is so full of people with good innovative ideas. We have to provide the encouragement, provide the incentive and provide the framework to let them flower.
Let me speak for a moment about the New Brunswick job corps which was a joint project between us and the province of New Brunswick for older workers who had lost their jobs in the forest industry. The forest industry was shrinking. We have come together as part of our strategic initiatives plan and put together a New Brunswick job corps for older workers.
Many of them went back to the forest to plant trees, to do the reforestation, to restore the resource. Others worked in a wide variety of other areas. I received one of the most encouraging letters last week from a gentleman from Moncton, New Brunswick who as part of his job corps experience has been working with the boys and girls clubs of Moncton, sitting down with young people, using his well honed, well developed talents from his years of working in forestry to impart that same kind of skill and that same knowledge to young people.
He wrote to me saying it was the best job he had ever had because he is back working with young people, giving them the skills they need. Rather than telling a 55-year old man he no longer is of use and is simply going to draw his benefits for the next year or two and will live out his life asking where is the meaning and purpose, we have given him new hope through the New Brunswick job corps. He is now back working in a job that gives him an enormous sense of satisfaction.
That can be done not just for one, but for tens of thousands of people, if we can take money spent through unemployment insurance purely for benefits and convert it into money for things like the New Brunswick job corps.
It can provide wage supplements for people to go back to work in the private sector. It can provide earned income supplements to get people off social assistance and back into employment. It can provide better training programs working with the private sector. It can provide good counselling in our programs so that people can understand what their choices and options are.
It can provide a new labour market information system from coast to coast to coast so that people will know exactly where the jobs are. They can plug their resumes into that system and an employer will know exactly who is available. They can do it right across Canada.
That is what we mean by social reform: re-engineering our system of unemployment insurance into an employment insurance system. We would be using the resources to give people the kind of incentive, the kind of support and the kind of encouragement they need to get back to work. We believe that is what Canadians want. They want to go back to work. The best kind of social security enables them to go back to work.
There is a transformation going on in today's workplace. Technology has an enormous impact in changing the way we work and in changing the kind of work available. We have to change with it. We cannot stay with the old programs and the old ways. Reform and change are essential to enable people to understand that this new workplace is something and that they have a real place to occupy.
My plea today is to let us use this budget as the launching pad. Let us use it as the foundation upon which we build a new employment system, a new work system and a new job system in Canada. With scarce resources and by working closely with the provinces, the private sector and community organizations, we would create new job opportunities. We would create new partnerships and would combine our skills and aptitudes to give Canadians real hope. Most important, we would use those resources so that Canadians individually could have choices. They could choose what kind of job, what kind of training, what kind of school and what kind of community they would build.
We launched social reform as a public consultation. It is now coming into practice as a program as of Monday night's budget. Its whole purpose is to give and restore to Canadians the choices about the kind of work they do, the kind of community they build and the kind of country they are going to live in.
