Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the hon. member's speech. He had all sorts of complaints about Canada, but he did not make any comparison to show the relative importance of all these problems. It is true that we, in our country, have many problems. There are always problems. The way to solve them is to find solutions. Before saying that we must leave this country, however, we should first look at the options. We should look at how other countries operate. Otherwise, we work in a vacuum. The hon. member has not taken that into consideration. I feel that Canadians should always consider our position in the world.
I have seen very poor countries in the world, such as Haiti. Haitians would love to trade their problems for ours, because ours are much smaller than theirs.
It seems the hon. member is a bit like the airline passenger aboard an aeroplane in mid air who decided it was too noisy and so he decided to get out. This country may not be perfect. It has a lot of problems. It is probably the worst there is, except for all the others. The United Nations said it is the best country in the world to live in.
This member does not want to consider that. He wants to look only at the negatives and only at the problems. Yes, there are problems and yes, we are committed to working on those problems. In the throne speech the government talked about how it is very important that we focus on problems like job creation even more than we have in the past.
We have to keep focusing on deficit reduction. It is important we get our economic fundamentals right so the economy can create jobs. We have interest rates down. We started two years ago. Our
interest rates were three points above the American's. Now they are about the same. That is a great improvement.
However, there are still problems. We still need to create more jobs. People in my riding of Halifax West are looking for jobs. The government has to keep focusing on that. We have to focus more on that in the next couple of years. I was glad to hear in the throne speech that we will do that.
It seems the throne speech sets the government in the right direction. The priorities set in the throne speech are Canadian priorities. They are priorities of the people of Canada from coast to coast, from sea to sea to sea, and they are the priorities of the government, as they should be.