Mr. Speaker, I will take these questions very briefly in reverse order.
What can we learn from the NDP government in Saskatchewan? Indeed we can learn from most governments across the country. In Saskatchewan, in particular, when the cutbacks came from the federal government in health and education, the provincial government backfilled those cutbacks so that spending was at least stable in those areas.
Spending has not increased in constant dollars or in real dollars because inflation has gone up. We still have a problem in that province in terms of spending on health and education, but that problem is not as severe as elsewhere because the Saskatchewan government backfilled the lost federal dollars.
The same thing happened when it came to some cutbacks in areas involving Indian and Metis people. Again the provincial government tried to backfill some of it.
As a consequence, along with Alberta we have the lowest unemployment rate anywhere in the country. It is under 6% and it has been consistently under 6% for a long time. That is better than my hon. friend's province of Manitoba which has a similar economy. One reason for it is investment in social programs.
Recently Saskatchewan is the first province in the country to balance its budget. That happened three or four years ago. There have now been four successive surpluses in the province and a commitment by the province to spend a third of a surplus on new spending for health and education, about a third on tax cuts and a third to pay down the accumulated debt.
We can learn from the Government of Saskatchewan that investing in social programs is a good idea for helping the people and for creating jobs. That is a legacy of the Saskatchewan CCF and NDP with Tommy Douglas, Woodrow Lloyd and Allan Blakeney. I know the member in a previous incarnation was very proud of some of those programs in terms of the ideas he promoted in the province of Manitoba, and I hope he still is.
Now I will go to the banks. I am not talking about an act that would force banks to invest a proportion of their profits in communities but an act that would force banks to invest a certain percentage of their deposits in the community where its deposits were drawn from. We would tailor it after what exists in the United States. Economists who have looked at say that it would create about 60,000 new jobs.
I will make one final point. Just reinvesting money again into health and education to bring us up to the levels of the federal government before the cutbacks would cost about $7 billion. That would be a very positive thing for the government to do.