Mr. Speaker, there is a balance to be reached here. I am not one to say the government should not do anything. I spoke against it building this coin plating plant because there is a very fine plant in business. It has a very long history of producing excellent coin blanks not only for Canadian use but across the country. I do not see any need for the government to get into that business.
There are things that government should be doing. As a people there are things we can do collectively through our government more efficiently than having everything privatized. For example, the post office as a crown corporation is an entity that can do a good job for the Canadian people. In some instances the individual outlets of the post office have been privatized. They are put out to tender.
I have heard both sides of the story. Some people say that it is great they can go to Shoppers Drug Mart at 10 p.m. and can get postal services, something they could never get before. Yet there are other people who say they cannot get the service they used to have because the people sometimes are not trained, their regular post office people have gone away and somebody else from cosmetics is filling in and they do not know the answers. There are some problems.
As parliamentarians and as a government we have an obligation to account to the people of Canada how we are administering their tax dollars and how the corporations that are run on their behalf are operated. It is not totally one side or the other.
I would not want to see everything in the country privatized, but I certainly have objection to the government using income from taxpayers and from corporations to run in direct competition with the people who have paid the taxes in the first place.
I remember many years ago there was a move in Saskatchewan where I grew up. There was a guy who had a good business—he supported his family with it—running a bus from Battleford up to Meadow Lake. He made a run a day and he always had enough passengers and freight that he could fill up his bus. He made the run and everybody was happy. He made a living on it.
Lo and behold the Government of Saskatchewan, the NDP government that likes to run everything on behalf of the people, bought the business. It gave fine service as far as I know. The service was not diminished but it lost money ever after that. Every year it posted a loss on that run and put this guy out of his job. That was a wrong decision.