Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Scarborough East.
This government has delivered on its key 1993 election promise to restore fiscal responsibility to the nation after the record $42 billion annual deficit we inherited from the predecessor Conservative government.
As the Speech from the Throne has noted, we are now well ahead of our own optimistic 1993 projections to balance the budget by the year 2000. We expect to achieve this budgetary goal no later than the fiscal year 1998-99.
We are putting the debt to GDP ratio on a permanent downward track and we have undertaken to devote one-half of the anticipated annual surplus to a combination of reducing taxes for Canadian citizens and amortizing the vast accumulated national debt left behind by the predecessor Conservative government.
The other half of the anticipated annual surplus will be addressed to the social and economic needs of Canadians. In striving over the period 1993-97 to get rid of those huge annual budgetary deficits that had become standard practice, we insisted on maintaining the integrity of our famed Canadian social security network and our pensions and free national medicare systems. We will continue these policies.
Members will note from the Speech from the Throne that the government has understood, better I think than governments in other countries, that the approaching 21st century will be a knowledge century dominated by those who have mastered the new sciences and technologies and who have comprehended the infomatics revolution.
In our last budgets we invested heavily in education capital from the $167 million for the TRIUMPH advanced physics research project at the University of British Columbia, with its direct spin-off to major industrial export contracts abroad, to the foundation for innovation with $800 million for modernizing advanced research infrastructures in health and medicine, environment, science and engineering, and the $50 million a year for creating networks for centres of excellence.
Canada leads today in the aerospace industry, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology in agriculture and fisheries and environmental information and telecommunications technologies.
Where our last budget offered $137 million in post-secondary education support for 1997 and substantially increased scholarship and tax credits for post-secondary students and their families, the Speech from the Throne commits to a new millennium scholarship endowment fund intended to reward academic excellence and to open access to universities and colleges for the well qualified children from low and moderate income families throughout Canada.
In recognizing the key to national economic prosperity and access to meaningful long term employment for our young people lies in community investment in higher education and in advanced research, the government has learnt the main lesson from the ending of the cold war that dominated world community relations for half a century after World War II.
The old political military base of world public order where effective power was determined by the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles that one had in one's arsenal is completely out of date. Of what value are those remaining ICBMs in their silos and an aging nuclear powered submarine navy if one's economic house is not in order?
The new base of world public order in relations between states is economic-industrial. The use or the threat of the use of force as a solver of international problems has increasingly yielded to peaceful modes of dispute settlement that rely heavily on friendly co-operation and reciprocity and mutual advantage.
In the Speech from the Throne there is a renewed commitment to an activist, independent, internationalist role for Canada in the world community in the tradition of our one time Prime Minister and Nobel peace laureate Lester Pearson whose centenary we celebrate this year. In this spirit we are co-operating with like-minded countries in revitalizing and modernizing and also democratizing the United Nations by seeking to expand the membership of the security council on a more broadly representative and legally egalitarian basis without any extension of those special privileges that were conferred on the five permanent members at the time of the UN's founding in 1945 and which seem increasingly out of date.
In addition to continuing our longstanding historical commitment to the protection of the international environment and to the conservation of the earth's diminishing natural resources, as part of, in the United Nation's own phrase, the common heritage of humankind, we have led in the achievement of a new international treaty signed by 90 countries recently in Oslo banning anti-personnel mines which have so cruelly killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent non-combatant men, women and children around the world in the bloody civil wars of our times.
Rather than pursuing some far off larger international consensus that might have included also holdout superpowers at the price however of open-ended exemptions or delays or special geographical regional exceptions, our foreign minister has preferred to move now on behalf of a clear and unequivocal treaty text that really does have some teeth in it.
At the formal signing ceremony in Ottawa this December, we do expect other countries beyond the 90 who have already rallied to the cause to join and to help perhaps to educate by their own positive example the numerically small but still important and also politically disparate groups of holdout states.
We will continue our efforts on two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, to ensure respect and full compliance with existing international law obligations, both multilateral and also special bilateral as to the protection of endangered fish resources and their equitable sharing under law.
We will maintain the position that we have advanced in the international battle against the Helms-Burton law that a state in the application of its own national laws is limited as to any purported extraterritorial reach by the legal principles of international comity and the duty at the same time to respect the legal sovereignty of other states.
We are continuing our efforts to establish an international criminal court which as a court of universal and general jurisdiction would replace limited geographical sectoral bodies like the recent ad hoc jurisdictions as the former Yugoslavia and also Rwanda. It might necessarily extend also to cover United Nations peacekeeping forces and other regional or state forces operating under UN legal authority or under the UN aegis generally.
The end of the 20th century as an era of historical transition has seen a remarkable convergence of two contradictory historical forces: the movement toward supranationalism and political and sometimes economic integration on a regional or at least transnational basis and the revival of local nationalism and ethnocultural particularism sometimes on a pathological basis that finds its outlet in internecine conflict within the one state.
Our renewed commitment in Canada to a strong internationalist foreign policy indicates our own Canadian, more optimistic view of the coming century and of the ability to achieve a genuinely one world outlook in a plural world community through the United Nations and related international institutions of the world community.