Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member opposite invited me, I will speak for British Columbia and for Canada. There is no dichotomy there.
Let us come to defining moments in our history as Canadians, and I think I can take note of two events of great interest. One is of course the role of the United Nations secretary general in the peaceful settlement of the gulf conflict. We will note here that the primacy of the Canadian policy of settling international differences by negotiation, quiet diplomacy, has been reaffirmed. It should be noted the foreign minister was very active in New York at the United Nations in the week before leading up to that.
I will take notice and with pleasure, because it involves the co-operation of an hon. member opposite, that B.C. spoke out for Canada, got rid of some of the old shibboleths. A British Columbia panel on national unity found that British Columbians have no hang-ups about understanding that Quebec does have civil law, that it does have a French language and culture and that a strong united Canada recognizes that fact. It is an interesting and total across the board expression of opinion in British Columbia without any demand for quid pro quos or reasoning arguments in return.
On the budget, it is a defining moment again in our history. It is not simply that after so many years the budget is balanced, but that it has been achieved ahead of the schedule that we projected when we first took office in 1993. From a $42 billion annual deficit, a disgrace, the budget we inherited, we are back to a balanced budget and that will be the reality of our times from now on.
Second, it has been achieved by using the theme which we campaigned on and I campaigned on in British Columbia in 1993, that the best way to balance a budget is to create new jobs, to create new meaningful employment. That is where we get more tax revenue. We tax the incomes. That is the way to do it and this is the way we are going.
Mr. Speaker, I forgot to say that I am sharing time with the hon. member for Kitchener—Waterloo.
I will say that the keynote in this budget is the emphasis on advanced education and research. That is a distinctive British Columbia contribution to this budget.
We fought the battle five years ago in support of TRIUMF, a pure research project. We had to face the inherited $42 billion annual deficit situation to make the case that pure science pays off. It is not simply some abstract ivory tower concept. The scientific ideas of today properly tested and properly applied mean jobs in industry down the line. With the German and Japanese syndrome the key to their economic recovery was to invest in higher education.
We took the minister for science and industry, one of our most imaginative cabinet ministers, to B.C. and we said that is a very distinctive laboratory. He said that it looked to him like a run down laboratory. We said that that was where the Nobel prize winner worked when he first came to Canada. He worked there and it is still in the same condition as it was 25 years ago. Something has to be done about scientific infrastructure. We cannot engage in advanced research, we cannot engage in research that is oriented eventually to production technology and everything else, without building up the infrastructure. The point was well made and in a period when we were still staggering economically because of that inherited deficit, the money was allocated to TRIUMF, $167.5 million.
We have basically been selling the idea that the next century is the knowledge century. Our universities, our graduate institutions have been allowed to run down in a real way by benign neglect by provincial and other financing authorities. It is time to correct it.
We see the response in terms of the grants for infrastructure, the Foundation for Innovation, to encourage medical research. By the way it should be known that British Columbia leads in areas of biomedicine and pharmacology. We lead in North America in these areas. We have already developed consortia style research arrangements with neighbouring American states. The networking of centres of excellence and the millennium scholarship foundation are other examples.
I had people speak to me about the millennium foundation when the idea was first in circulation. They asked “Isn't that elitist? Is it only for graduate institutions?” We explained that first of all there is a constitutional issue. We have no doubt that we can constitutionally put the money into advanced research. It is getting beyond that. We need the co-operation of the provinces. We are trying to get it, but they are not as active in education in all parts of the country as they should be. Some provinces like to spend money which we think should go to education on highways or something else.
We are basically stressing in this particular issue the need for federal leadership. In the budget the finance minister used a very delightful phrase. He did not simply speak of our great universities which now have international status and they really are leaders. He also mentioned the community college in northern Alberta and the institute of technology somewhere in rural Ontario. It is reaching down. Frankly, our hope and our intention is, with the co-operation of the provinces, to get into the secondary education field.
Education is our investment in making sure that the jobs created are meaningful jobs. Look at the statistics. People without advanced education, without college degrees, have very limited chances of finding employment. The opportunity to grow is with the people who have diplomas. That is why we are investing in this area. It is a dramatic, radical doctrine in that sense. It reflects the inspiration of ministers like the science industry minister, his very bright secretary of state who is no longer with us because of electoral vagaries, the finance minister himself and the Prime Minister, who accepted the notion that it is the knowledge century and that is where this budget should make a breakthrough.
We have learned the lesson of the Germans and the Japanese. If we want to recover, we have to invest in knowledge.
I would like to acknowledge the assistance given to us by the university faculties, in my province the University of British Columbia, the science faculty and deans, and also the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the association of university professors and the community colleges who are coming to us. We want to reach out to the community colleges. They have helped to make this a very dramatic budget which will put us firmly into the position where we can lead in the next century.
When we took office, the reality was that we were lagging behind the countries with which we were competing in world markets.
The telling point concerning TRIUMF was that it was not simply pure research. We have already seen a $200 million export contract spinoff from TRIUMF. We are outbidding other countries in Indonesia and elsewhere. We have brought $200 million of business to British Columbia. That is where the link was made. I compliment my caucus colleagues and the caucus committee on higher education and research for the work they have done.