Mr. Speaker, I would like to say at the outset that I am going to share some of my time this evening with the member from Beauséjour—Petitcodiac.
Think for a moment. It is 3 o'clock in the morning. Power went off three hours ago. The house is dark and cold, darker than dark and colder than cold. The rain won't let up. The creaking of the frozen trees and the cracking of their ice bound limbs mark the minutes of the longest night of your life.
You tell yourself everything will be all right, you will make it through. If only it would stop raining. If only it would stop freezing. If only the power would go back on. Then it does, like a miracle. The dark is banished, the warmth returns and you breathe easy again.
It is no miracle. It is not even anything but the ordinary. It is just another day and night on the job for public service workers. That is what is extraordinary. Out there in the dark, out there up some pole or down some ditch, out there scrambling over iced fence lines, out there pelted by driving rain, out there with the frayed high voltage wires, out there with the exploding transformers, they are hard at work.
They think nothing of it. It is their job and they do it. They do it night and day. They do it day and night until the power is restored and until life is normal again.
Throughout the entire ice storm and throughout the efforts to repair the damage, it was the same story. Everywhere we saw ordinary people performing extraordinary deeds, and not for money, never for the money. Not the soldiers, not the Hydro workers, not the water and sewer workers, not the neighbours helping neighbours, not the strangers helping other ordinary people, never for the money.
Extraordinary. Extraordinary because, in this time of world-wide economics, when money seems to be the great motivator, money can do anything, except magic.
But what has helped us here was not the power of money, but the power of something far more important, the power of community, the simple instinct to help each other, no questions asked. It was extraordinary.
It was something much stronger and of greater value than money. It was the power of community, the simple instinct to look out for one another whether or not you could make a buck out of it. That was extraordinary. It is extraordinary when we are told how often that kind of thing does not matter anymore in our society, how all the old values are quaint curios with no place in this age of cyber space and virtual reality. There was nothing virtual about the ice storm. It was about as real as reality gets. In the face of that ice cold reality it was the values that made the difference, the values of community, of caring and of compassion, the value of social solidarity.
We should learn something from that. We should learn that there is value in things that are not ever traded on the stock exchange and that to casually throw them away, discount and diminish them is dangerous to our well-being, our well-being as individuals and our well-being as a society.
Another clear lesson from the ice storm is that we still count on government a lot. Private enterprise may be very good at some things but when the power is out and the cold is creeping in no one calls McDonald's or Eaton's or mbanx. We call and count on the services run by our governments. We expect and trust them to get done what needs to be done when we need it, and it was done.
Some members of this House have made a career out of attacking the institution of government, the very idea of government. They complain loud and long about the supposed great injury big government does to them. They attempt to rally support with calls to get government off our backs. They want to downsize, diminish, cut, slash, generally reduce government to nothing much more than a credit bureau or a cheque clearing house. Tonight their silence is deafening. No one is saying there was too much government during the ice storm. No one wants government to turn its back now.
The point is we all know there is a place and a use for effective and efficient government and it is not just during ice storms or floods either.
We appreciate and understand that government at its best is a tangible expression of our desire to do right by each other, to make an unfair and unjust world a little more fair and a little more just. A strong, engaged and responsive government with a well trained, well equipped and well motivated public sector is necessary to create any chance for the kind of life we all want and we all work for.
Our relationship to ourselves and to our government was, is and should be much more than a cash and carry trade. That was not evident before the ice storm. It should be now.
A long time ago Jean-Jacques Rousseau set out the ideas that led us to form ourselves into democratic societies. He talked about the social covenant we all enter into when we consent to live in harmony together, each with individual rights and each with responsibilities to one another. He warned that such an arrangement could collapse into chaos when the social bond is broken in our hearts.
The ice storm showed us that social bond is not broken in our hearts, not yet anyway. It showed us how we must value and jealously protect that bond ahead of anything we could ever lock away in a bank. If we can do that we can be as certain of a bright future for ourselves and our country as any people who ever lived on this blue-green planet of ours.
Finally, I am thinking this evening of the victims of this disaster.
I would like to congratulate them on their courage and solidarity in facing up to this crisis. They have been a source of inspiration for the rest of the country, and we shall never forget their struggle. Thanks to these men and women, we have had an opportunity to witness a perfect example of the Canadian spirit, the spirit of sharing, of solidarity, of community.