Mr. Speaker, again I comment quite favourably on the speech of the hon. member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, or New Glasgow to be more specific. I thank him for his comments. There are a couple of things I would like him to elaborate on if at all possible.
He speaks of the solicitor general but after the last couple of days, I think we should be speaking of the Office of the Solicitor General because we in our party more or less think of the current solicitor general in the de facto mode.
With regard to the responsibilities of the port police and what has happened in Nova Scotia and Vancouver regarding two major ports and the easier access organized crime now has to smuggle contraband items of any kind, whether they are drugs, weapons, forged money or whatever, those responsibilities are now merging with the ones of the municipal police or the city police of the area. Of course, I am in total disagreement with that. I really appreciated the idea of a separate police force or enforcement agency and that their business was strictly only that, not only in the two major centres but in the smaller centres as well, in the smaller ports.
He mentioned a concern about the drug trade and our cuts to foreign aid. Would he and his party not also agree that one way of reducing organized crime's efforts to bring in contraband drugs for example, would be for our foreign affairs department, our immigration department, CIDA, et cetera to give third world countries more access to capital? Their farmers and people in the agricultural industries, and I am thinking of Asia, Columbia and other third world countries, would then get away from their dependency on things like cocaine, heroin and poppy seeds and would be able to concentrate on more economic alternatives.
As he knows, the cuts to foreign aid to these countries have made these people very desperate for any cash or income of any kind. They resort to what we would call the criminal element and grow the cocaine and heroin that organized crime brings into our country. Of course, the effect of cuts to our military and cuts to our police allow organized crime to bring this contraband into our major ports as well as to our coastal communities.
Communities on all three coasts are being devastated by economic cuts in terms of fisheries and other related matters. People are moving away from those communities and we do not even have a civilian presence in some of these communities, which makes it easier for organized crime to do its job.
I would like the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough to comment, please.