Madam Speaker, I rise in support of the harmonized sales tax. I see it, as many speakers have said before me, as being part of a more efficient system of national taxation. I see it as being part of the wider construction of an economic foundation for Canada, allied with our efforts on deficit reduction and program review.
To me the real significance of the harmonized sales tax is the message it sends out to Canadians about our ability to work together. The real significance is the progress we have already made with the province of Quebec and with some of the Atlantic provinces in establishing the basis for a national harmonized sales tax.
If we can work together, as we have, on such a thorny question as the harmonized sales tax, what other good things can we achieve in that same spirit? What is the foundation that we are building and what is the future which we will build on top of that foundation?
We have to move beyond these economic foundations to some kind of view of ourselves which is grander and more important than the ones we have been concentrating on to date. We have to realize that out there beyond the harmonized sales tax is a series of greater projects, national projects which will allow us to attain greater goals. In order for that to happen, as we have done with the sales tax, we need to set timelines and priorities. We need to measure progress and outcomes.
Most of all, we have to recapture the spirit of working together in the execution of these projects because it is only by working together that all of us can recover our collective sense of optimism and hope as a country.
In his 1996 budget the finance minister set out a vision of Canada for the new millennium. Successful countries do more than occupy a place on a map. They live in the souls of their people because they are relevant to the betterment of their lives. So for Canada it is time to set goals anchored in our shared values and our shared aspirations.
We have done that throughout our history, in the days when we dared speak of a national dream and then built it, in the days when we aspired to a kinder society and then created it. We have set great national challenges, not small ones, because it is only by reaching as high as we are able that we will discover how far we can go.
Why can we not decide together in the House and in this country that ten years hence Canada will be regarded as a world leader in the new industries of the new economy, in biotechnology and environmental technology, and in the cultural industries of the multi-channel universe? Why not decide that ten years hence increasing child poverty rates will be a thing of the past, that illiteracy will be erased from our communities and that when it comes to international tests our students will not simply do fine work but will be the very best? Why can we not decide together that medicare ten years hence will not simply survive but that it will be the most successful system in the world, a system which will be second to none?
Why not decide that 10 years hence our streets will be the safest they can be, not because we have the largest number of prisons or police but because we have faced squarely the causes of crime? I ask with the finance minister why not indeed.
Moving from that vision and those goals will require what the Prime Minister referred to last year as a domestic Team Canada. It simply means all of us working together. The harmonized sales tax has been an example, a difficult, trying example of us working together with the provinces to achieve a more efficient and fairer Canada.
National goals and national projects are not simply federal, they are national. They require all levels of government, federal, provincial and municipal, to work together. Beyond the kind of co-operation we have had with the harmonized sales tax, national projects require the participation of the public and private sectors, of trade unions and social activists, of professionals and volunteers. Above all, national projects demand the full participation of citizens.
National projects are of a scope and scale that no one sector of society can achieve in isolation. National projects allow us to mobilize all our resources as a country to achieve a great collective purpose. National projects remind us of why we need a country in the first place.
The role of the federal government, as it was in the case of the harmonized sales tax, in promoting national projects, is to think of the interests of all Canadians. The federal government must put before Canadians a series of goals and invite their comments and participation, as we did in 1993 with our red book. The federal government must act as a strategic broker in forming the partnerships that can achieve national projects. The federal government can neither dictate, implement nor fund national projects by itself.
National projects demand that we put aside our differences and see Canada as a collective enterprise, a fate sharing vessel. We have to see ourselves as a society of mutual obligation, not simply a collection of provinces, interest groups and individuals. It requires thinking of ourselves as a national society to reach national goals by creating national projects.
In the 1996 budget the finance minister outlined an ambitious series of goals for the next decade. Our task as a government for the next four years, if we should be re-elected, is to choose four or five of these national projects which will have the strategic effect of fundamentally improving the lives of Canadians.
One such national project would be to set for ourselves the goal of making Canada the best country in the world for the care and nurturing of young children. If we could say of Canadian children from birth to the age of six that Canada has the lowest poverty rate, the lowest rate of child abuse, the best prenatal programs, the best parenting courses, the best child care programs, the best rate of school readiness by the age of six, the positive consequences for Canada would be enormous.
By this single national project we would have gone a long way to achieving many of the goals set out by the finance minister. Not only would we have reduced child poverty, we would have dramatically improved literacy rates and we would create solid base for future academic success and for employment success in the new economy.
If we could produce six year olds with the best coping and learning skills in the world, this would be the single greatest investment in improving subsequent adult health status that any society could make. These same competent six year olds will dramatically lower drop-out rates, delinquency rates and crime rates as they grow older.
What would be required to achieve such a project? Nothing less than a mobilization of all our resources, professional and voluntary, public sector and private, community by community, province by province, coast to coast. By enumerating and configuring all our existing assets, by setting goals, objectives and timelines, by measuring and monitoring our progress, by sharing results nationally through the Internet and by each level of government and each sector of society taking their share, eliminating duplication, co-ordinating efforts and filling gaps, this national project is eminently achievable. Why indeed should we not attempt such things in our next mandate?
The harmonized sales tax creates a climate of working together which makes such national projects possible. It has been difficult but it shows us that such things can be done and that what we have to do is broaden our vision of a better Canada for the 21st century.