Mr. Speaker, I never had a psychedelic Volkswagen bus in 1968. I always bought much more enjoyable cars than that. Maybe the member for Calgary Southeast had one.
Times change. If we look around the world, the most effective governments with regard to growth in the economy are not the governments looking back to the past, to the 19th century as the Reform Party does on economic policy, but looking forward to the 21st century.
I am sure the member is aghast at the prospects of a social democratic government in Germany. That will make 14 out of 16 developed countries in Europe with socialist governments. All of them deal with the most important issue which is to provide an economy that ensures people can earn a decent living, raise their families and look forward to the future with some kind of confidence and expectation that they will be doing better rather than worse.
Looking around at the Canadian economy and Canadian society, it is not predominantly the social democrats who take economic ventures into public ownership. There is much more public ownership of the economy in the province of Alberta than there is in the province of Saskatchewan. Incidentally, Saskatchewan also has the lowest per capita cost of government than any other province. It is much lower than in Alberta. There are significant lessons to be learned by looking left instead of looking backward.
The important element of the social democratic economic strategy is that we work in partnership. Business, governments, workers, aboriginal peoples and communities all work together to build a vision for that economy. We all undertake certain responsibilities within the performance of that vision.
It is not difficult to understand if we look at how the Saskatchewan government under Premier Roy Romanow has built that province. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the best indexes of economic growth of any province because it works in partnership.
Saskatchewan is now growing in population. Only last week I learned that last year 1,000 Manitobans moved to Saskatchewan. That has not been normal in the past. We are required to bring Canadians from across the country because that economy is booming. We have full employment. We have skill shortages. We need people for existing jobs and we cannot find them.
This is a successful economic strategy. It is a modern economic strategy. Social democrats are looking forward to the next century, not like the Reform Party which is looking back hankering after and longing for the 19th century.