Madam Speaker, I am pleased to address Bill C-91, which seeks to change the name of the Federal Business Development Bank, as well as its purpose.
The Federal Business Development Bank is a long-standing institution which has played an important role in economic development, as a bank of last resort. That was and should continue to be its mandate since that bank should not compete with other financial institutions.
The bank gets a new name which is of strategic importance for the federal government. It will become the Business Development Bank of Canada. What does that name mean exactly? Will it strive to develop business and the economy or Canada?
It reminds me somewhat of development banks in Africa. I guess the government now recognizes that it is running a developing country. We must look like a developing country in the eyes of the international community. The federal government just confirmed that the state of its economy is appalling, that its debt is staggering. It just said so. It will probably get foreign money through the Business Development Bank of Canada, just like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development gets money, even from Canada, the United States and Japan, to develop eastern countries which have problems.
By using such a name, it should be easier for us to go to Japan, even China, and to richer countries, since Canada has become a developing country. In fact, we are among the 65 or 70 poorest countries of the world if you look at the national and foreign debts. Canada is on the same level as developing countries. This new name is a pretty smart idea. It will probably allow Canada to borrow more money abroad to promote its own development, before it goes bankrupt, assuming this is not already the case.
In Quebec, we took control of our financial institutions a long time ago. In Quebec, we already have control over a few hundreds of billions of dollars thanks to our caisses populaires , the Fédération des caisses d'économie Desjardins du Québec, the provincial charters we control ourselves, as well as over our priorities in terms of our activities, and we want to keep it. We also want very much to continue to cooperate with our financial institutions.
We do not want the federal government to interfere through a financial institution which will have a much broader mandate and will prevent Quebec from working hand in hand with its own financial institutions as it has always done.
We had to build our financial institutions ourselves because the federal government was not very useful in helping us to keep our money and invest in our industries. Again, I understand very well why the very centralist Liberal government wants to control everything. It wants to control our priorities, it wants to collect our tax revenues and spend the money according to its own priorities. Not only does it want to impose its priorities in terms of manpower training, but it also wants to do so in the trade area.
Let me give the House some examples which have led me to believe that the federal government is trying to increase its control. It says that it will be able to sign agreements with other financial institutions and with other private companies in order to defend some industries. For instance, we know, and I often come back to this issue which I find important, that the federal government never supported Quebec's hydro development programs. The province of Quebec was the sole investor in Hydro-Quebec. It invested tens of billions of dollars, while the federal government never spent a penny on these projects.
Again, the federal government will want to be the one to decide which industries should be given priority for development purposes. This means that the federal government could favour businesses in the uranium, natural gas or oil industry, for example, over businesses in the electric power industry. That is what it means. When we say that the federal government wants to control industrial priorities in Quebec, it does it through the Federal Business Development Bank by interfering even more and by making decisions regarding economic development priorities in that province. It is terrible.
Do not think that we are fooled. We can see very clearly what is going on. We know the history of Quebec. We have lived through it. I come from Quebec, I was part of the business community and I know full well that Quebecers had to work twice as hard to achieve the equivalent of what Ontario was able to achieve. Why is that? Because the federal government was working against us.
The federal government has always worked against us. Just look at what is happening in Ottawa with regard to research and development, for example. Three or four years ago, I conducted a study to see who was getting research and development contracts. Well, in 1990, research and development contracts awarded to businesses and universities by the federal government totalled 1 billion-