Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to enter the debate on the budget implementation legislation.
I cannot help but respond to some of the comments made by my colleague from Calgary Centre. Members talk about originality. I went door to door in the last federal election. We had a phrase in my organization that we took some time to study as people do when they enter into a campaign. Our phraseology was a fresh start. We had that on our brochures. We promoted it because it was very much a fresh start for Canada and for the people Durham.
Canada had its fresh start back in 1993. It always gives me great delight when I hear the Reform Party saying me too another four years later. That tells us a lot about its policies. Basically it is mired in the past.
It has taken us a long time to get to where we are today in our fiscal responsibilities. Past governments of all political stripes for a variety of reasons created deficits and debts which we have had the responsibility in this administration to deal with. I say responsibility because we have not shirked our responsibilities. Looking back
to when I first wanted to enter this place, it was basically to improve the finances of the country.
I am proud to be part of a government that took that commitment seriously, that started off with a $45 billion a year deficit and dropped it to $35 billion. In the last budget it is down to $17 billion. We can see that we are going in the right direction.
The hon. member talks about a long term plan. Presumably he means that somehow we are going to make it go away tomorrow. We are not. We have a long term plan. The long term plan is toward fiscal responsibility, getting the deficit and debt down.
The hon. member wanted to intervene about taxation. Reformers talk about the lower income groups they will drop off the tax roll. There may well be some merit in that but that kind of policy creates a tax wall. It creates a wall so that people cannot get away from the lower income. They are lower income people and as soon as they jump over the wall they are hit with 20, 30 or 40 per cent taxes. That is the kind of regime the Reform Party would have us enter into.
They spend very little time talking about the other side of the issue. They want to give their buddies and friends, the rich of the country, a reduction in taxes. Who picks up the bill for that? It is the middle income earners, the people in my riding, people with $50,000 or $60,000 worth of income. They are the ones who will pick up the bill for the so-called Reform agenda.
I agree with another aspect the member mentioned. I do not want to dwell a long time on Reformers. On the infrastructure spending program they went on and on about comparing infrastructure dollars to jobs created. Nowhere did we ever say that the prime motivation of the infrastructure spending program was to create long term jobs. We always said it created short term jobs. It gave people hope.
It gave people hope. I remember back in 1993 when people had no hope at all. Once that infrastructure spending program came into play, people saw things were happening. More important, the infrastructure spending is not directly impacting jobs per se. It is creating the infrastructure or the environment where governments and small business people can create wealth. They have better roads and better sewer systems. They can create business opportunities.
The Reform Party seems to have entirely missed this point. It is mired in the past. It keeps studying history.
One thing my colleague said, to lead me into the main part of my dissertation, was that Canadians for some reason do not feel good. They feel a queasy uncertainty. It is that uncertainty with which the budget deals. What is that uncertainty and what drives it?
Basically, what drives it is that we live today in a period of change that is no different from the industrial revolution. Things are changing because the country is moving to a different type of economy. The Reform Party does not seem to understand what that change is all about and how it impacts people.
The people are concerned about jobs. Clearly, if someone is unemployed they are concerned about jobs. However, the people who are concerned about jobs today are the people who have them. People are worried that they are going to lose them for some very specific reasons. They see how technology has impacted their lives and it gives them fear and concern. I would like to discuss that concern relative to this budget and relative to my riding. In some ways, it is a microcosm of what the problem is.
In Durham, we have General Motors. The General Motors plants are in the riding south of mine, in Oshawa, but a lot of the workers live in my riding. More important, the person who started General Motors in our area, Sam McLaughlin, had a carriage factory. That is part of my riding.
In those days, Sam McLaughlin was building carriages so that horses could trot people around for their transportation. When General Motors came to Canada, it needed a framework to develop an automobile industry. That is very important. Most of the growth in this economy has been in the automotive sector. Basically an engine was put on a carriage that horses would pull. Think of that. We are talking about the 1800s. Think of what that meant to the people who lived there at that time.
They were people who were working on carriages for horses or people who raised horses. It must have been very disconcerting to them to see suddenly these cars going around and their business and agriculture threatened. They must have worried at night about whether they were going to maintain some kind of livelihood with this new engine of change that was enveloping them in Durham.
What happened, of course, is that this new engine created new change. It created the need for gasoline. It created the need for better roads. We were talking about infrastructure only a few minutes ago. It created the need for those kinds of infrastructures. It created the need for auto mechanics.
Generally speaking, most people will agree that if they actually study the people who got new employment from using a car, in fact, they got better jobs. They got higher paying jobs than they would have had if they were in the agricultural sector.
That is change that is really upon us. A lot of people have uncertainty. They feel uncertainty about that change. The opposi-
tion parties, whether Reform or Conservative, breed on this uncertainty. They try to say it is the government's fault that we are living in a period of change. Nothing could be further from the truth. What people need is the courage and conviction to go forward into the 21st century.
When I look at Durham today, in some ways we are very much married to that industrial economy. I have some interesting statistics here. The industrial economy allowed for a relatively modest degree of human capital to resolve into a fairly good return on people's labour. People talk about the new society which is upon us as the new knowledge based society, which requires considerably more human capital to get that higher return.
In Durham, this is something I have been very concerned about. Of course, Durham, General Motors and the automotive sector are very close together. It has created a problem for us to break out of that and to start realizing the potential benefits that science and technology can deliver. What do I mean by that? It can mean prosperity in the lives of people for better jobs, better lives, better health care, et cetera.
Over 25,000 people in my riding of Durham have post-secondary education. The education of over 18,000 of those people is science related. Durham has a population of approximately 250,000 people. That is not a lot when that aspect is considered. Another aspect to be considered is why people are not educating themselves in the area of science and technology.
Of the 18,000 people who have those degrees, only 8,000 have jobs in the field of science. In reality, there is a deficit in Durham of over 10,000 people who cannot work in Durham because no jobs are available in their field. They have to go away. A lot of our youth also go away to be educated.
The government's program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, is just one way to equalize that and for our educational institutions to utilize the $850 million. We talk about the importance of frugality in spending, but we have found a way to spend money in these very important-