Debates of Oct. 13th, 1999

Fisheries

[Mark Muise, Progressive Conservative, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, will the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans confirm here and now that non-native fishers will be included in negotiations on an equal footing with native fishers and the federal government?

[Herb Dhaliwal, Liberal, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans]

Mr. Speaker, we have said all along that to resolve these issues we must get all the parties working together toward a common solution.

I met with the commercial fishermen and the processors. I spent two days out there to ensure that I had the benefit of all views. I also consulted with all my colleagues on both sides of the House, as well as my counterparts in fisheries.

We have a solution in place. It is working because dialogue and co-operation are working.

Labour

[Gurbax Malhi, Liberal, Bramalea—Gore—Malton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Labour. Construction workers at federal work sites deserve to receive not only a fair wage but also fair treatment.

Could the minister tell me what she will do to ensure fair treatment?

[Claudette Bradshaw, Liberal, Minister of Labour]

Mr. Speaker, as of September 29, 1999, fair wages in our labour act has been in place in the country. That will mean for our workers that any workers who work on a federal contract will be paid fair wages. The schedule will be posted and the workers will know what their wages should be.

I would like to thank the unions and the construction workers across the country for helping us to put this in place. I am very happy that it has been done.

Immigration

[Leon Benoit, Reform, Lakeland, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the taxpayers of Canada's largest cities and the provinces bear the brunt of the government's bungling on immigration. Yesterday Toronto's mayor, Mel Lastman, said he is tired of the government's excuses and his city can no longer afford the Liberal's broken immigration system. The mayor of Toronto is simply expressing the frustration on immigration felt across this country.

How does the minister respond to Toronto's mayor and Canadians who share his concerns?

[Elinor Caplan, Liberal, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Speaker, my department is working co-operatively with the city of Toronto. We are trying to gather the data and the information. We know that this requires a response from three levels of government: the federal government, the provincial government and the municipal government. I want to point out that the refugee population that the mayor is concerned about represents about 10% of the concerns that he has and we are working with him to resolve those issues.

I want to make one point very clear. As we do this, the government remains committed, as opposed to the opposition party, to upholding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; not just for some, but for all.

Pakistan

[Francine Lalonde, Bloc, Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Subsequent to the military coup d'etat in Pakistan, serious warnings were issued by the United States, most of the countries of Europe, the European Community, the secretary-general of the Commonwealth, and the head of the IMF. All of these called for a return to democracy as quickly as possible, and respect of the Pakistani constitution.

Can the Minister of Foreign Affairs tells us what Canada's position is?

[Lloyd Axworthy, Liberal, Minister of Foreign Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, we have done the same as the other countries.

In addition, we have also arranged to have a meeting of the Commonwealth ministers on Monday which will apply the Harare principles to Pakistan concerning this military takeover. In fact, I think we are ahead of all these other countries.

Points Of Order

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I think you would find unanimous consent to withdraw any existing motions for emergency debates on the fishery issue and to adopt the following:

That on October 13, 1999 the House shall continue to sit after 6.30 p.m. and, commencing at 6.30 p.m. or when the House leader of the Progressive Conservative Party completes his remarks in the debate on the proposed Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne, whichever is later, the House shall consider a motion “That this House take note of the difficulties in Canadian fisheries, especially as complicated by the Queen and Marshall case and its implications for both aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples and for the future management of natural resources”; provided

That during the said debate: (1) no member shall speak for more than 20 minutes, with a 10 minute question and comment period being permitted, and provided that time may be divided pursuant to Standing Order 43(2); and (2) the Chair shall not receive any quorum calls, dilatory motions or requests for unanimous consent to propose any motion; and

That, when no member rises to speak or at 12:00 a.m., whichever is earlier, the motion shall be deemed to have been withdrawn and the House shall adjourn to the next sitting day.

[The Speaker]

Does the member have the unanimous consent of the House to put the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Speaker]

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

(Motion agreed to)

Committees Of The House

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present the first report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs regarding the membership and associate membership of the Standing Committee on Transport.

There is a procedural motion contained within the report to enable that committee to begin business immediately, and I should like to move concurrence in the first report.

(Motion agreed to)

Requests For Emergency Debates

[The Speaker]

I received six applications for emergency debates for this evening. Two of them have been withdrawn by the unanimous consent of the House, namely the applications made by the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough and the member for Delta—South Richmond.

That leaves me to deal with four others. I would ask the hon. members, as I call upon them, to state their case for an emergency debate in a very concise fashion. I would first call on the hon. member for Palliser.

[Dick Proctor, NDP, Palliser, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I rise under Standing Order 52(2) to seek leave to propose an emergency debate to address the deepening financial crisis that is affecting far too many Canadian farm families.

I remind the House that we had an emergency debate on this crisis on November 30, 1998. However, since then the crisis has only deepened in its intensity. Last November the agriculture minister predicted that as bad as 1998 was for farmers, in particular those in western Canada, particularly Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the forecast for 1999 was even worse. Unfortunately, that prediction has been realized.

Spring flooding has compounded the situation. Those that escaped the devastation of rising waters continue to be battered by record low commodity prices and highly subsidized competition from producers in the U.S. and Europe.

Without immediate and effective help, up to half of the farmers in western Canada could be out of business by next year. Bankruptcies on the prairies are already up 24%. Statistics Canada reports of the situation in Saskatchewan this year indicate that take-home farm incomes are forecast to be the worst in more than 70 years.

I believe that an emergency debate is required in order to urge the government to address this crisis. Parliament has the responsibility to find long term solutions. Mr. Speaker, I would urge you, respectfully, to consider an emergency debate in an immediate and timely fashion.

[The Speaker]

I will hear the member for Selkirk—Interlake because his request deals with farming. I believe from the letter I received that it is in the same genre.

[Howard Hilstrom, Reform, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the crisis situation I referred to in my letter to you asking for an emergency debate absolutely involves the statistical analysis of Statistics Canada, which has clearly indicated that farm incomes will be flat and will be dropping as a result of low commodity prices and the actions of our competitors.

This emergency arises now because last fall the standing committee on agriculture held hearings on the problem. As a result of those hearings and the report that was put forward it was determined by the government that the only problem was a sharp drop in income for farmers for 1998-99. According to Statistics Canada, the truth of the matter is that during the past five or six years incomes have been dropping to very low levels and they are projected to remain flat.

The fact is, the federal government has addressed a short, two year program that is not providing money to the majority of farmers. That is the reason we must have an emergency debate. The government has not addressed the issue. Farmers are going bankrupt. Calls to the Brandon, Manitoba stress line for farmers are up three times over what they were a year ago.

We are dealing with a true crisis. The number of farm groups coming to Ottawa to stress their point to the minister requires that we in the House debate the issue to bring forward what the real problem is and what the solutions are.

[The Speaker]

My colleagues from Palliser and Selkirk—Interlake, not diminishing in any way the importance of such a topic, I feel that at this time it does not meet the criteria for an emergency debate.

I will now hear from the hon. member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast.

[John Reynolds, Reform, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast, BC]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 52, I request leave to make a motion for the adjournment of the House for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter requiring urgent consideration.

Following a January 1999 British Columbia supreme court decision concerning the possession of child pornography, the British Columbia Court of Appeal did, on June 30, 1999, dismiss the appeal to reinstate subsection (4) of section 163.1 of the Criminal Code.

The supreme court has scheduled a hearing on this matter for mid-January 2000. Given the normal time required for the supreme court judgments, this issue will not be disposed of until perhaps 2001.

The legality of the possession of child pornography is not limited to the province of British Columbia. In fact, defence counsel in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta are arguing cases now based on the British Columbia decision to make child pornography legal in those provinces.

The government did not find reason in the Speech from the Throne to discuss this issue. That is why I served notice after the speech yesterday.

On February 2 the minister said in the House that the government was acting immediately on the issue and would not wait for the case to reach the Supreme Court of Canada. Sixty-three Liberal MPs and six senators signed a notice to the Prime Minister asking him to use the notwithstanding clause in this child pornography issue because it was so important last February.

The children of this country cannot wait until 2001 to find out that child pornography is illegal to possess in Canada.

This is an issue of children. Children were mentioned in the throne speech yesterday but this issue was not mentioned.

I think all members of the House agree that the law we have is a good one; it is only some judges who do not. We have to debate that issue in the House and come up with a solution to protect our children a lot quicker than the judges of this land want to protect our children.

[The Speaker]

I do confirm that the hon. member did write to me explaining this particular case, but I do not feel at this time that it meets the criteria for an emergency debate.

With reference to the member for Lakeland, if there was some confusion and if I did misread the information I had, I will entertain a letter to be sent to me again today so that the hon. member can address his subject tomorrow.

We will now go to Orders of the Day.

The House resumed from October 12 consideration of the motion for an address to Her Excellency the Governor General in reply to her speech at the opening of the session.

Speech From The Throne

[Preston Manning, Reform, Leader of the Opposition]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to reply to the Speech from the Throne presented yesterday by Her Excellency the Governor General. In doing so I want to take the opportunity on behalf of the official opposition to extend our best wishes to the former Governor General on his retirement as well as our congratulations to the new Governor General on her appointment.

This summer, my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting the region of New Brunswick in which Mr. LeBlanc will be enjoying his retirement, and we can readily understand his desire to live in that magnificent part of the country.

Along with other members of the House, we also had the opportunity to listen to another speech by Her Excellency the Governor General at her swearing in ceremony a week ago. I might say it was an excellent speech. It was much better than the speech prepared for her by the Prime Minister. We wish Her Excellency well in all her future communications.

I also want to extend on behalf of the official opposition our best wishes to the members of the Canadian Armed Forces both at home and abroad. Their contributions to maintaining peace in the world are even more significant in light of the hardships and resource limitations that they must endure, not the least of which are those imposed upon them by their own government.

In the next few days my colleagues will be dissecting the Speech from the Throne in considerable detail, pointing out its deficiencies, which are many, and presenting constructive alternatives. My task today is to deal with the big picture which I will now proceed to do.

We stand on the threshold of a new century. Canadians have a right to expect that the legislative program presented by their government would put forward bold solutions to old problems and chart new directions for a new century, solutions and directions inspired by principles and vision. We see none of that in the Speech from the Throne. What we have here is essentially more of the same, perpetuation of the status quo.

For example, over the summer the country faced specific problems demanding government action. We heard of some of them today, from people smuggling on the west coast, to violence in the east coast fishery, to an agricultural crisis on the prairies, to the need to completely reorganize the airline industry. The Speech from the Throne does not even acknowledge the existence of these problems, let alone offer solutions that are based on some kind of vision of the future for those sectors or some kind of fundamental principles.

The greatest defect is the deficiency in principle and vision, a deficiency for which the government attempts to compensate with bland rhetoric. For example, the government refers in the speech to the principle of clarity as essential to national unity. It talks about the importance of principles to the national children's agenda. It talks about the need for principles to govern co-operative approaches to infrastructure development. But in none of the sections where it mentions the word principle does it spell out what these governing principles are. In most of the other sections of the speech there is no attempt to specify at all the principles that will guide the government's actions.

Since the government has chosen to exit the 20th century not with a bang but with a whimper, it is my intention to present an alternative set of principles for directing the legislative program of the government and an alternative vision for Canada in the 21st century, alternatives which I believe are in keeping with the deepest convictions and hopes of Canadians.

Let me start with the principles of fiscal responsibility. When Reformers were first elected to parliament, we won support on the basis of a commitment to certain clear-cut principles of fiscal responsibility. Today we are even more committed to those principles because we are even more convinced they are right for Canada and Canadians.

As our chief finance critic, the member for Medicine Hat, has repeatedly argued, we want a federal government that is committed to controlling and prioritizing its spending, to balancing its books, and having a legal commitment to balance its books not just a policy decision, to lowering its debt and reducing federal taxes, and doing so at a pace that is far faster than that being followed by this timid and tired administration.

One of the things that bothers me profoundly is that it can be demonstrated from polling data and research data that there was majority public support in this country as early as 1984 for balancing the federal budget. There was majority public support for balancing the federal budget as early as 1984 and yet it took two administrations and 15 years to achieve what for most of us is a self-evident objective that should have been achieved far sooner.

This Speech from the Throne is rife with government references, bowing and scraping toward the recognition of the global economy and high tech knowledge and computerization. The essence of all of that is speed in decision, yet when it comes to meeting the fiscal obligations of this country and implementing fiscal policies, the government moves at the pace of a snail dragging a chain through the mud.

It should be understood that the official opposition wants real tax relief and debt reduction, not as an end in themselves but because of the benefits that will flow to Canadians. We do not have just an academic interest in this principle. It is the benefits that will flow.

I have a dream. It is a simple one and it gets reinforced every time I go to a factory or a plant and talk to workers. It is a dream of getting a pay increase, just a pay increase for every Canadian worker and family. That is reasonable. It is a pay increase that does not come from their employer but from a reduction in the high taxes collected every day and every month by a tax crazed government.

We are talking about real, substantive tax relief. It is quite evident that the Canadian public, and particularly workers, are simply not going to believe promises of tax relief from anyone unless they can see it in a tangible form. They are going to look at their paycheques at the end of the day and they will believe they have tax relief when the federal deductions have been reduced. They will not believe any other promise or commitment to tax relief unless it shows up on the bottom line.

This is our vision of tax relief. Its impact on families could deliver up to $4,600 of tax relief per year per family for them to use on whatever they choose, such as education, shelter and clothing. We think the people themselves are the best ones to direct those expenditures whether they are socially directed or economically directed.

But what do we see in the Liberal administration's implementation of these principles of fiscal responsibility? We see a government whose main financial priority has been to collect and spend as many taxpayers' dollars as it can, from $107 billion, or almost $14,000 in federal tax revenues per family in 1993, to $148 billion, or $18,150 in federal tax revenues per family in 1999, and still growing.

We read in the Speech from the Throne on page 9 that the government will follow a multi-year plan for tax reduction. Why would anyone take this at face value when we consider what the government has said and done on this subject in the past?

On one occasion the finance minister said that the ultimate goal was to lower taxes but—and unfortunately there is always a but—lowering taxes and reducing the fiscal load would not be possible. He then promptly raised federal tax revenues to $14,835 per family. The next year the finance minister said that we could not have a massive tax cut across the board, and promptly raised federal tax revenues per family to $15,614.

The next year, speaking about across the board tax cuts, the Prime Minister said “I do not think it is the right thing to do in a society like Canada”. Somehow it is un-Canadian to give them back some of their money. That year, as if to reinforce the point, the finance minister raised federal revenues per family up to $16,550.

The next year, along with the budget close to being actually balanced, the finance minister said that to put in place a broadly based tax cut now would be irresponsible. That year he raised federal tax revenues per family to $18,000.

Is it any wonder that Canadians will regard tax relief promises from the throne speech with extreme, justifiable scepticism. The government's taxation record is in precisely the opposite direction to the direction it promises in the throne speech.

The most deceptive half truth in the entire throne speech is on page 9. I could hardly believe the statement, when I heard it standing in the other place. If it had been in the prospectus of a company filed with the Ontario Securities Commission, this half truth which fails to disclose the other half of the truth, whoever put it together would be liable to spend up to five years in a provincial institution.

This is the statement: The government says it has begun to deliver broad based tax relief totalling $16.5 billion over three years. It gets this figure by adding up projected tax reductions for the financial years 1999-2000, 2000-01 and 2001-02, for a total of $16.5 billion. What it fails to mention is that during those same three years it also projects tax increases, namely through increases in CPP premiums and bracket creep, amounting to $18.4 billion for a net increase in the tax burden on Canadians of $2 billion.

The first great deficiency in principle and vision that we see in the Speech from the Throne is the lack of principle and substantive commitment to the great principles of fiscal responsibility, in particular tax relief that is the key to both sound government and a prosperous economy for the 21st century.

In our judgment, this is a deficiency which cannot be remedied by trying to change tax and spend Liberals into tax cutters. It is a deficiency which will only be remedied by the election of 150-plus members to the House who on a certain night in a certain month—probably February or March—are prepared to stand up in the House and vote for real, genuine, substantive tax relief.

Let me turn to economic policy in general. The official opposition's vision of an economically prosperous and secure Canada for the 21st century includes much more than just a fiscally responsible federal government and lower taxes. It includes a Canada where jobs with good incomes are plentiful rather than scarce because the job creation engine is fueled, not by patronage-tainted and politically motivated grants, contracts, handouts and subsidies from the government but because it is fueled by dollars left in the pockets of consumers to spend and businesses to invest. It is private enterprise. It is an old concept but it happens to work.

We envision a Canada where the younger generation is valued and encouraged by economic opportunity to make their future in Canada rather than being told by the Prime Minister to go to the U.S. if they are not prepared to pay exorbitant taxes. Talk about a children's agenda. He is telling our children, “If you don't like the tax system here, if you think the levels are too high, go somewhere else”.

We envision a Canada where economically disadvantaged regions and people, including aboriginal people, are given the tools to direct and create their own economic future by participating in a free enterprise, market based economy, not a country where aboriginal people are given the obsolete, dependency creating instruments of government planning and socialist economics.

One of the big reasons we object to the Nisga'a treaty is that it is straight out of the 19th century. There is no other group in the country that the government would have the nerve to say, “Your economic development is going to be achieved through collective rights and collective ownership of property and resources”. There is no other group that the government would have the nerve to say that to. It then hands off those types of tools to aboriginal people. Exactly the same mistake the country made in the 19th century we are making as we enter the 21st century.

We envision a Canada where challenges faced by agriculture, the infrastructure sector, the airline industry or professional hockey are met by policies that give them tools and frameworks to solve their own problems rather than increasing dependency on the government.

Time does not permit me to deal with all the points in the Speech from the Throne where the Liberal government's approach to economic problems or the problems of particular sectors violate these principles, but let me touch on just three examples.

The first example is the brain drain. The official opposition has some of the youngest members in the House. Many of them spend a lot of time on university campuses and they hear about this problem all the time. I hear it every time I go to a campus. What is the question that we are asked by younger people at the universities? Some person will go to the microphone and say, “I'm graduating next year with such and such a degree and my wife is graduating with such and such a degree. Here's my tax position in Toronto. Here's my tax position in Chicago. You tell me why I should stay here one day after I graduate”.

When I see the new pages in the Chamber I do not just think of the pages as servants of the House. I know many of them have ambitions and are studying far beyond spending time here in the House. I think of them as representatives of the younger generation who are looking for incentive, opportunity and things like that from government, not punitive taxes that create the opportunities for them somewhere else.

The government fails to see that high taxes drive youth, capital, jobs and companies out of the country. Its response to the brain drain is to deny it. It does not bring to the problem of the brain drain what free enterprise, market based principles and fiscal responsibility in government can offer those people. That is a huge mistake. It is a deficiency in principle, not approaching the problem from a principled basis, and a deficiency in vision.

Let us look for a minute at the agriculture situation. This summer the member for Selkirk—Interlake and the member for Souris—Moose Mountain arranged for me to spend a little time talking to farmers and producers from southwestern Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan. I do not have to tell the members in the House who have a background in agriculture about the depth of the dilemma. We have thousands of farmers who have suffered two disasters beyond their control. In that particular region, the disaster was an enormous amount of flooded acreage, an inability to seed after the flooding and late seeding leading to frozen crops in the fall. We now have the bigger problem of foreign subsidies driving commodity prices down to the point where a large number of our farmers cannot make a living.

It is worth looking at some of the statistics that the hon. member referred to a minute ago. Statistics Canada confirmed that 1998 was a disastrous year for Canada's farmers. Realized net income was down 21% over the year before. Agriculture Canada forecasts even worse for 1999. National realized net income of $2.2 billion and that figure includes payments from the government's AIDA program. The hardest hit will be Saskatchewan where Agriculture Canada predicts a net loss of $48 million. Manitoba will fare only slightly better earning $64 million, a little less than the net realized farm income of Prince Edward Island. This is one of the great agricultural provinces of the prairies yet that is what its net income is.

I ask the Prime Minister to listen to this. Put another way, the realized net income for all farmers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan taken together will be down 98% from the previous four year average. I cannot imagine that if any other group had statistics show that its net realized income had fallen 98% because of something beyond its control the government would not respond. However, in the Speech from the Throne there is no visionary response to this problem.

I do not want to labour this but I will read the statistics. The statistics do not tell the real story. Behind the statistics are incredible amounts of heartbreak. I have been going to farm meetings ever since I belonged to a 4-H club in the Horse Hill area of Alberta in the 1950s. I have gone to all kinds of agricultural meetings with different commodity groups, et cetera.

At some of the meetings we went to this summer we talked to people in this dilemma. I cannot recall ever having seen people who could not even talk about the problem. These are stoical, independent western farmers who would go out behind the barn and shoot themselves rather than acknowledge that they have a problem. They tend to be that way.

At these meetings we saw grown men breaking down and crying. It was not because of their bottom lines but because they were losing the farm that their grandfather had. It was because of what it was doing to their families, the stress lines that the hon. member mentioned. People are calling for help from psychiatrists, ministers and everybody else and the government does not respond.

The government has to do three things. It must first recognize that its AIDA program is a joke and is not working. The agriculture minister goes around saying that the government has promised farmers $25 or $50 an acre to put together with the provinces. I defy the government to find one farmer who has actually received $25 an acre. Some farmers pay $500 to accountants to fill out the forms to get $40 back while others pay $500 only to be told that they do not qualify for anything. Nobody gets what is in the press releases because there are a whole lot of strings attached: what was their last three years' average; what is their deductible, et cetera. There are 100 reasons for not getting the money. They want to know where the replacement for AIDA is and they want it fast.

Secondly, where is the expanded crop insurance program that includes disaster relief? This business of inventing a new ad hoc program every time there is a natural disaster is crazy. It politicizes the thing. It causes all kinds of problems for the minister. Why do we not extend crop insurance to include broad based disaster insurance?

Thirdly—and this is one for the prime minister—where is the team Canada mission to Europe that is not just a glad-handing exercise but includes the prime minister, the minister of trade, the foreign minister and the agriculture minister and which makes a powerful argument with the Europeans that their subsidies are killing our farmers?

If we are committed to free trade, and the government professes to be committed to free trade, this is not just knocking down trade barriers and subsidies at home. Yes, it does include that and we have supported that, but it also means being even more vigorous at knocking down the other guy's trade barriers.

If the prime minister has great influence with President Clinton, why does he not use it on behalf of the farmers? If Canada and the U.S. teamed up to fight European subsidies rather than the U.S. just outbidding them, we could have an impact on those subsidies which are killing our farmers. I suspect the reason the government does not take this approach is because it really is not committed to market based, free enterprise ways of solving this problem. It will cut our subsidies but it does not go after the other guys.

There is one other sector where I see a deficiency in the government's approach which is again a backward looking approach. The Speech from the Throne has a little section on physical infrastructure. It makes only token references to the demands for new highways, new roads, new bridges, new airports, new ports and all types of physical infrastructure development. The speech states nothing at all about the need for north-south trade corridors, the need to build the transportation networks and rebuild the transportation networks that are moving a billion dollars of trade a day across the American borders.

If the government looked at that it would soon come to the conclusion that there are not enough dollars in the public works budget of the Government of Canada and the highways departments of all the provinces to even meet the physical infrastructure investment requirements of the west. If we add them all up, there is not enough to even meet the requirements for building infrastructure in the west over the next 20 years.

What does that mean? It means we are going to have to find massive amounts of capital for investment and infrastructure from other sources. I say that the only place we are going to find that is in the private sector. We are going to have to look to these public-private partnerships in order to build that type of infrastructure. Guidelines will be needed from the federal government to make sure that these projects are not screwed up the way the federal government did it in Atlantic Canada where it picked public-private projects which did not meet the requirements or the priorities of the provinces and where the project got tainted with patronage right at the beginning which discredited the whole approach.

My conclusion is that the second great deficiency of principle and vision that we see in the Speech from the Throne is the lack of a principled substantive commitment to encouraging and facilitating individual and corporate enterprise and better operations of free markets to solve the actual practical problems in many of these particular sectors.

I have already spoken of Reform's vision of fiscal responsibility and the need for governments to constrain their natural appetites for excessive taxation and misdirected involvement in the economy. However, fiscal and economic ideals are not ends in themselves. They are but means to more important ends. Those more important ends for us are social and moral in nature.

I now want to turn to the social and moral dimensions of the Speech from the Throne. In the judgment of Reformers, the highest moral responsibility of government is the passage of just laws and the maintenance of law and order. The most important social responsibility is the protection and nurturing of the family. Let us look at what this throne speech does in those two areas.

When it comes to criminal justice, we have a vision of Canada as a safe society where people can live their lives, walk on the streets, drive on the highways, go to school, go to work, shop in the stores, visit the parks and live in their homes without fear of harm to themselves or their property or, even worse, fear of harm to their loved ones.

I think of the many seniors we run into when we are door-knocking as all of us do. They live in fear in Canada inside their own homes. They are afraid of theft. They are afraid of assault. They are afraid to go out at night. They are afraid of a knock at the door. Some of them are men who risked their lives for the country when they were young, and they have to live their older years in fear. Some of them are women who pioneered in the workforce while raising families. Many of them are people who built our homes, our towns and our cities.

Do we not owe our seniors more than a pension? Do we not have a moral and social obligation to protect their physical safety and to lift the federal government's constitutional obligation to create peace and order off the dry pages of the constitution and give people peace and order in the place where they live?

It seems to us the only people who are really sticking their necks out to protect citizens from crime are police officers, particularly the ones who work on the streets. These are the men and women who literally put their lives at risk every day to make public safety a reality. How does the government treat them? It slashes their budgets and it turns their work and their risks into a mockery through a revolving door parole system and an unbalanced justice system.

To achieve the idea of genuine public safety for Canadians we believe the federal government must embrace the principle that the protection of the lives and property of the citizens must be the highest ideal of the criminal justice system. The right of Canadians to this protection and consideration must take precedence over the rights of the perpetrators of crime.

When we examine the policies and actions of the government we find them lacking in commitment to this principle. Let me take the classic illustration of this point from the events of this summer. Federal law, as everyone in the House knows, provides for the legal entrance into the country of immigrants and genuine refugees. However those laws were repeatedly violated this summer by international gangsters smuggling illegal entrants into Canada on our west coast.

This people smuggling is not only illegal but is a gross affront to the hundreds of thousands of legitimate immigrants and legitimate refugees who have waited patiently in line and fulfilled everything we have asked of them—all the hoops, all the paperwork, all the time delays—in order to have legitimate legal standing in the country.

The points I am making have been pointed out by official opposition critics for immigration and justice, but I want to repeat them again. The official opposition has called for expedited procedures to detect, detain and assess illegal immigrants and to immediately deport those who are not genuine refugees. In doing so we are not calling for something unusual or draconian. This is what the 1987 amendments to the 1976 Immigration Act were supposed to accomplish.

However there is a problem which those and subsequent amendments to the Immigration Act have not remedied. Many members in the House know what it is. Why do we not do something about it? The problem is that in 1985 the Singh decision by the supreme court ruled that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies to everyone who is physically present in Canada, even if they got here illegally and even if they have no legal standing whatsoever. So we hand to those engaged in people smuggling and to illegal entrants, regardless of their status, all the legal tools required to fight deportation hearings, deportation procedures and deportation orders. They can fight it for years to the point where the whole process of dealing with illegal immigrants and refugees becomes a farce.

This is an issue of law and order. It is an issue of criminal justice. We look to the federal government for a solution to make its laws enforceable so that rights granted to persons without legal standing in our country and violating its laws, are not allowed to tarnish or diminish the rights and privileges of those who fully comply with our laws.

When we look at the Speech from the Throne, what do we see? Sad to say, we see nothing in the Speech from the Throne to correct this deficiency in principle and vision with respect to the Canadian criminal justice system.

What is the third great deficiency in principle and vision that we see in the speech? It is a lack of principled and substantive commitment to criminal justice reform, in particular reforms which ensure that when the rights of law abiding citizens and victims of crime conflict with the rights of the perpetrators of crime it is the former that prevail over the latter.

As I said earlier, the social vision of Reformers attaches the highest priority to the protection and nurturing of the family. Our vision of Canada regards the family as the most important organizational unit of society. This is a statement of principle to which I believe many members of the House subscribe. Surely for each of us it has some real and substantive meaning.

Last weekend was Thanksgiving. Mr. Speaker, what are you thankful for? What am I thankful for? Well, many things. I am thankful for being a Canadian. I am thankful for growing up within driving distance of the Rocky Mountains. I am thankful for a Christian heritage and for the religious liberty which allows each of us to turn toward God or away from God and to accept the consequences of our own moral decisions. I am thankful for political freedoms. Reformers complain a lot about the political system of the country, but I am thankful for the freedom that allows my friends and me to start a political party and to try to change the government.

I am most thankful in my life for my family, and I think a lot of members share this. What was the most important thing Sandra and I did on Thanksgiving? We spent time with our family, as many other members did.

I am thankful for the kindness and nurturing of my mother and for the wisdom and example of my late father. He was my hero. I am thankful for my wife, Sandra, and for the spiritual foundations of our marriage which have enabled us to withstand all the stresses and strains that everybody here knows politics puts on a marriage.

I am thankful for the effort Sandra makes to keep our family healthy and strong and the way so many of our spouses sacrifice their own interests for us to be playing in this game.

I am thankful for my own boys who have grown up to be strong and sensible with the help of a lot of other people besides myself, and who can do so many things from fishing to making music to operating computers far better than I can do.

I am thankful for my daughters; for their relentless pursuit of excellence in sport and education; for making life and faith commitments of their own; for their choices in husbands, the two who are married; and for the strength that these men bring to our family. I am thankful for three precious little grandchildren, with another one on the way, who find love and acceptance and roots in the family while at the same time becoming its brightest promise and prospects for the future.

I am thankful that such a family allows us to support and care for each other: children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents and siblings, and turn to one another in times of need instead of having no one to turn to other than a stranger on the end of some government telephone line.

In expressing this thankfulness for family I am not denying for a moment the importance of government services, whether it is health, education or social assistance, that help the well-being of families. I am not denying for a moment the harsh realities of all those who because of economic, social or personal circumstances have lost or been denied the benefits of family, or those for whom family has been transformed into a place of violence and insecurity.

My heart aches for such people, especially for the children in such circumstances, to do something to preserve the health of more families in the face of economic, social and personal hardships and adversity to give today's young people, regardless of the family circumstances in which they started out, at least a fighting chance to avoid some of the mistakes of our generation and to provide the benefits of healthy family relationships at least for the next generation, for their children and their grandchildren.

May I suggest that if the Liberal government really wants to do something for children there are a number of other practical things it could do that are not in the Speech from the Throne. For example, it could focus first and foremost on doing something for families. It should not focus on government programs that attempt to substitute for families. It should focus first and foremost on supporting the family directly. It might start at the beginning, if it had the moral nerve, by defining the rights of the unborn. This it will have to do if it intends to reintroduce its bill on reproductive technologies. It will have to get into that subject and it would be better to do it sooner rather than later.

Second, if the Liberal government really wants to do something for children, it should state clearly the definitions of marriage and family which it believes are most conducive to the well-being of children.

On June 8, 1999, for example, the House passed by a vote of 216 for and 55 against a resolution moved by the hon. member for Calgary Centre which read as follows:

That, in the opinion of this House, it is necessary, in light of public debate around recent court decisions, to state that marriage is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, and that Parliament will take all necessary steps—

Where are the steps? We did not see any in the Speech from the Throne.

—within the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada to preserve this definition of marriage in Canada.

The government's support of this motion was a good step but it should be followed by another. If the Liberal government really wants to do something for children, it should also clarify the definition of family as the primary biological and social context into which our children are born.

It is the Reform Party's conviction that a family should be defined as individuals related by blood, marriage or adoption. Members should note that this definition is broad. It is not a narrow definition of family. It is broad enough to embrace a so-called traditional family, common law relationships, the single parent family and the extended family which is so important to many new Canadians.

Affirming these definitions of marriage and the family is not to say that parliament cannot recognize in law other relationships of dependency, but in our judgment these should not be confused in law or public policy with marriage defined as the union of a man and a woman or the familial relations based on that union.

Some might argue on the basis of the supreme court's recent M. v H. decision that the court is headed, whether we like it or not, in the direction of saying that in Canadian law a couple is a couple is a couple, regardless of the basis of the relationship. However I believe I speak for the majority of parliamentarians, not just Reformers, when I say that it is parliament's intention, that it was parliament's intention and that it is still parliament's intention that the union of a man and a woman, which is unique in its potential for the natural procreation and nurturing of children, should be in a category by itself as should be the familial relations based upon it.

On page 22 the throne speech states that Canada will champion efforts at the United Nations to eliminate the exploitation of children. If this is the case, the government should then direct the courts here at home to stop protecting the consumers of child pornography. When parliament passed that section of the criminal code, and that debate has gone before the B.C. court, it intended that the possession of child pornography should be treated as a crime. Why? Because possession represents the demand side of the pornography industry. If one wants to shut down the pornography industry one has to go after the demand side and not just the supply side.

If the criminal code does not make it crystal clear that is what parliament intended, the government should introduce legislation that makes that crystal clear to the courts. If the courts still insist that section of the criminal code is not charter compatible, the government should not hesitate to use the notwithstanding clause now to enforce such a provision. Surely if the government values children it will put their right to protection from the evils of pornography ahead of any adult's right to possess child pornography.

The throne speech also expresses particular concern about child poverty while often ignoring the family context in which much of that poverty occurs. Again if the Liberal government wished to do something about child poverty, it could do two practical things which do not require the invention of some new program. It could stop overtaxing the parents and stop taking up to $6 billion a year from people making $20,000 a year or less.

The government takes in $6 billion and tries to figure out how some complicated program, which will cost a lot administratively, will give them back a couple of hundred dollars for this or that. Am I missing something, or would it not be simpler to leave the dollars in their pockets, stop the unfair taxation of single income families and see just how many new child care spaces that creates?

What is the fourth great deficiency in principle and vision that we see in the Speech from the Throne? It is the lack of a principled priority commitment to the protection and nurturing directly of the Canadian family, the human context, the primary biological, economic, social, cultural and spiritual context into which our children are born.

It is a deficiency which in our judgment cannot be remedied until there are 150-plus members in the House who are convinced in their hearts as well as their heads that the number one social priority of government should be the protection and nurturing of the family.

There is another set of principles nowhere alluded to in the Speech from the Throne and yet absolutely essential to the implementation of any legislative program approved by parliament. They are those principles that define the proper line between the executive, parliament and the courts. In recent years we have seen these lines increasingly blurred by this administration. We have seen the courts increasingly encroach on the prerogatives of parliament to the point where one might argue that one cannot fully interpret the Speech from the Throne until after hearing the speech from the bench. I have three examples.

There is the impact of the Singh decision on the government's ability to halt people smuggling. What difference does it make if this parliament sets up the ideal system for handling immigrants and refugees? As long as the Singh decision stands, there are legal ways around it. It can be fought every step of the way for seven years.

There is the impact of the B.C. court decision in the Sharpe case which legitimates demand for child pornography. It is already having a secondary impact in other parts of the country while we wait and wait for a court decision that may not come.

There is the impact of the Marshall decision on the management of the east coast fishery. I understand we will have a debate tonight during which we can get into this in detail. The member for Delta—South Richmond will be saying a lot on this a little later. In the Marshall case the court affirmed an aboriginal fishing right from a treaty that does not contain the word fish. Talk about writing things in, that is a good example.

Apparently no one, and this is the responsibility of the government and not the court, made a convincing case for the dangers of having one law for aboriginals and another law for non-aboriginal fishermen. No one made the case apparently of the threat that unlimited fishing rights create for destroying the biological basis of the fishery. And apparently no one made the case that the government, through its constitutional right under section 91 of the Constitution and its responsibility for fisheries, also granted rights to fish under certain licences and if the court was going to deal with this problem at all, it was a matter of balancing two sets of rights, one against the other, not simply affirming one set of rights.

The court made a fishery policy as distinct from parliament making a fishery policy leading to, in this case, violence and chaos on the east coast fishery.

Switching to the positive, the official opposition has a vision of the proper relationship between parliament, the court and the executive. It is a vision that is rooted in our own Constitution and several hundred years of British constitutional convention and precedents. It is based on a simple principle, that parliament makes the law, the administration administers the law and the court interprets the law. In our judgment any delegation of law making by the executive to the courts by default, which is what this government does, or any proactive assumption of law making functions by the courts is a violation of this basic constitutional principle and it needs to be corrected.

Maybe the following explains why the government is not enthusiastic about correcting it. The root of the problem is that the BNA Act of 1867 founded Canada on a constitution “similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom”. One of the founding principles is that parliament makes the law, the executive implements the law and the courts interpret it.

But in 1981-82 the Liberal administration of Pierre Trudeau, an administration in which the current Prime Minister was the justice minister, initiated and secured the passage of the Constitution Act, at the heart of which was a constitutional device similar in principle not to the constitution of the United Kingdom but to that of the United States. I refer of course to the charter of rights and freedoms. This law included for the first time in Canada a constitutionally entrenched guarantee of civil rights. It served the same function in Canada as the U.S. bill of rights but without any of the checks and balances on the three branches of government which are found in the American Constitution.

That is what happens when you transplant an idea from one constitutional system to another. You do not necessarily bring along with it the checks and balances that made it work in the original situation.

With the introduction of the charter to the Canadian Constitution a great departure began from the historic division of responsibilities between parliament and the courts which continues to this very day. The consequences of that departure include replacement of the supremacy of parliament with the supremacy of the Constitution as interpreted by judges. They include a transfer of power from parliament and the legislatures to the courts, including a transfer of the ultimate right of interpretation. The other consequence is the thrusting, whether they want it or not, of unelected judges with no direct accountability to the people into the realm of decision making and political activism.

The consequences of this great departure and the political activism of the courts are enormous. I suggest to members that they go far beyond simple legal and academic questions concerning the appropriate balance between the courts and parliament. Look at the list of things into which this great departure has taken the courts whether or not they wanted to go there.

The Mahé decision of 1990 took the courts into the operation of school boards. The Eldridge decision of 1993 took the court into affecting provincial government budgetary decisions. The Singh case of 1985, as already pointed out, took the court into the administration of immigration and refugee procedures. The Therens case of 1985 created an enhanced role for lawyers in criminal proceedings that went far too far and which has had negative effects. We saw further evidence of political and social activism by the courts when they created the defence of self-induced intoxication, something parliament never ever dreamed about in any of its wildest moments. That was via the Daviault case in 1994.

There was court direction of public policy with respect to vagrancy via the Heywood case of 1994. There was the extension of the requirement for the use of warrants to unreasonable lengths via the Feeney case of 1997. It took the courts into the elevation of the protection of language rights ahead of the protection of citizens from criminal activity via the Beaulac case of 1999, and into the establishment of procedural delays as grounds for abandoning thousands of criminal prosecutions via the Askov case of 1990.

We saw further evidence of the great departure when the courts extended the democratic franchise to prisoners via the Sauvé decision of 1993. It legitimated the rights of adults to possess child pornography via the Sharpe decision of 1999. It imposed a limit on the sanctity of life by striking down provisions for the regulation of abortion via the Morgentaler decision of 1998. It interjected a court ruling on spousal benefits into the politics of a provincial election, which I find utterly inexcusable, via the M and H decision of 1999. It has triggered violent confrontations over diminishing fishery resources on the east coast via the Marshall decision of 1999.

I could keep the House here all night reading court cases, but on some future occasion I am hoping the Prime Minister will ensure this parliament addresses this issue explicitly. At such time it would be my intention to lay before parliament a number of measures for clearly delineating a line between ourselves and the courts. These measures include a number of things, of which I will mention three.

First would be measures to ensure that parliament specifies in each statute it passes the intent of that statute and that it obtains independent legal advice, because we cannot get it from the justice department, on the charter compatibility of bills before they leave this place rather than after. It is a process of pre-legislative review.

We would also recommend that these remedial measures include the establishment of a judicial review committee of parliament to prepare an appropriate parliamentary response to those court decisions that misconstrue parliament's intent, and include recommendations of the appropriate use of the notwithstanding clause which I remind hon. members is just as much a part of our Constitution as is the charter of rights and freedoms.

When we look at the Speech from the Throne we do not see any recognition of this even though it affects everything we pass here. Why is that? I suspect it is because on many of the issues affected by the political activism of the courts, especially in moral and social areas, the Liberal administration would prefer to have the hard decisions made by Liberal appointed judges rather than by the elected members.

If that is the case, we will not see a remedy to this problem until there are 150-plus members elected to this Chamber with a commitment to change and to draw the line crystal clear between parliament and the courts.

I turn now to the state of our federal union, a subject on which the Speech from the Throne devoted about four specific paragraphs and yet is one which is central to everything we do.

As all members here know, Canada is the second largest nation in terms of territory on the face of the earth. It consists of ten provinces and three territories encompassing an enormous breadth of cultural and regional diversity. In order to unify this great diversity into one nation from sea to sea to sea, our forefathers rightly chose to apply the principles of federalism. Canada is therefore a federal state, but because of its size and diversity it is a federal state that cannot take its internal unity for granted even for a month.

This parliament has the right to expect that every Speech from the Throne would contain at least two things. One is substantive measures to address the particular concerns and aspirations of the great regions that make up this country. The other is something substantive with respect to the application, preservation and advancement of the principles of federalism on which our continued unity depends. Let us look at the present state of our federal union and the Speech from the Throne from this perspective.

This summer my wife and I spent several weeks in the west, two weeks in Quebec, two weeks in Ontario, and almost three weeks in Atlantic Canada. We attended some 80 different functions, many of them informal social functions which gave us a good opportunity to interact with people. We listened to the predictable concerns of people about taxes, jobs and health care. But we also perceived something else, something less defined and yet very real and something that is bigger than people's day to day concerns.

There are four big regional concerns and aspirations which I believe are abroad in our land and which this federal parliament must recognize and address in order to maintain the unity and progress of this country in the 21st century. Four strong winds are starting to blow with increasing velocity; four strong winds which, if we ignore or misread them, can put our federal ship on the rocks; four strong winds which, if properly harnessed, can propel this federal union forward with confidence and security into the uncharted waters of the next century.

Let me begin in the west. I like beginning in the west. In June, Sandra and I travelled to the Milk River country of southern Alberta. There we borrowed two horses and a tent from a longtime rancher in the Milk River area, Tom Gilchrist. For three days we joined the anniversary trail ride commemorating the 1874 march west of the original North West Mounted Police contingent; a great adventure which originally took 275 officers and men from Fort Dufferin south of Winnipeg all through the southern part of Saskatchewan and southern Alberta to Fort Whoop-Up 125 years before.

That original group of North West Mounted Police included Colonel James MacLeod who would lay the foundation for a treaty with the great Blackfoot confederacy on the basis of a simple principle: equality under the law. I wish James MacLeod had been around when they were putting together the Nisga'a treaty. That is how he made peace with the fiercest group of aboriginals left on the prairies. It was the last group to have a confrontation with the Europeans. He made it on a simple basis. A couple of RCMP walked into a huge camp. There was one law, the same law, for whites and Indians. He did a few things to back it up and that was the basis of that peace.

The fort he established on the Old Man River became home to F.W.G. Haultain a few years later. Haultain was a lawyer from eastern Canada who came out west. He became the greatest premier the old North-West Territories ever had. He was the one who negotiated the provincial terms of entry of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the federal union as provinces. What was the principle he insisted on, even though he did not get it? Equality for provinces. Equality between the new provinces and the old provinces.

Members of that same old Northwest Mounted Police contingent would soon establish another fort at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, Fort Calgary, the place where over a century later nine premiers and two territorial leaders would meet and produce a declaration asserting the principle of equality of all Canadians and provinces under the law and that any power given to one province to protect and develop its uniqueness would be given to the others. Equality for individuals and provinces was as much a founding principle of the old west as accommodation to the French-English fact was a founding principle of central Canada.

That old west, including British Columbia, was wild and vast with enormous potential. It attracted people of enterprise and initiative who overcame all sorts of obstacles and hardships. Members should read the story of the original march west by the RCMP if they want a story of overcoming hardship.

That old west had all sorts of new ideas and convictions on how the west itself should be governed. But politically the old west had one huge problem. It was politically impotent. At the turn of the last century the west produced less than 10% of the GNP, had less than 10% of the population and had less than 10% of the seats in this parliament.

The old west lacked political clout to impress its concerns on the federal government, let alone impress its ideas. It quickly and unfortunately developed an underdog attitude that if it participated in negotiations with the national government or if it participated in political dialogue with people in other parts of the country it would rarely win the debate and would always be outvoted and outnumbered.

What struck me as I rode through that country commemorating the opening up of the old west was how far the west has come in a century and how different the position of the new west entering the 21st century is in comparison to what the old west was at the turn of the century.

In that Milk River country, if one stands at the right place, the Cypress Hills can be seen to the east, the Sweet Grass Hills of Montana to the south and Chief Mountain to the west. These were all sacred places to the Blackfoot. They were high places from which the Blackfoot believed they could see forever and from which they believed they could see the future. It was a place where the young saw visions and the old dreamed dreams. Could any of the people who mounted those heights at the turn of the last century, aboriginal or non-aboriginal, possibly have envisioned the new west of the 21st century?

The new west is no longer politically impotent. In the 21st century it will produce over one-third of the wealth of this country. It will have over one-third of the population of this country. British Columbia will become the second largest province in the country and the west will control over one-third of the seats in this parliament.

In the 21st century it will be impossible to implement any truly national policy without the west's concurrence or to form any truly national government without western participation. The great challenge for westerners is how to use this newfound influence.

There will be some, “little westerners” Haultain would have called them, who will advocate that the new west should use its growing influence simply to settle old scores and that the west should confine itself to addressing its own immediate regional interests. These people will prefer regional parties over national parties. There will even be some who will say, regrettably, that the new west should use its influence to separate from Canada. Fortunately there will be others, “big westerners” Haultain would call them, who will advocate a much more positive and inclusive course.

Reform is the principle and Reform is the voice of the new west. We say yes, the new west should use its influence to protect and advance regional interests, to raise the agricultural concerns of the prairies higher on the national agenda, to protect the oil and gas producing regions from another raid by the federal government, to prevent the west coast fishery from suffering the same abuse as the east coast fishery and to make B.C. Canada's gateway to the Asia-Pacific.

We also say that the new west should use its new influence in the federation to address and resolve the problems of the federation as a whole, to get the federal financial house in order by insisting that tax and debt levels be lowered for all Canadians, by advocating that national health care—medicare, after all, was born in the west—be reformed for the benefit of all Canadians, by insisting that federal institutions be made more representative and democratically accountable for all Canadians, and by insisting that the equality of all Canadians and all provinces under the law become a governing constitutional principle throughout the entire country and be pounded into the heads of members of parliament.

When we look at the Speech from the Throne from this perspective, what do we see? We see no evidence at all that the federal government even recognizes the existence or emergence of the new west, let alone a preparedness to accommodate its aspirations.

The federal government is at odds, in particular with British Columbia, on everything from the mismanagement of immigration and refugees to the mismanagement of the fishery to the mismanagement of aboriginal relations. It has negotiated a treaty with the Nisga'a which is based not on the principle of equality of all under the law, but on the divisive principle of one law for aboriginals and another for non-aboriginals.

Rather than offering tax incentives to reduce greenhouse emissions, the government has mused about imposing a green tax which would discriminate against the petroleum producing regions without proposing any compensatory measures or equivalent environmental taxes on competing energy sources.

By failing to propose or mount a concerted international attack on European agricultural subsidies, it refuses to get at the root of the low commodity prices that are doing enormous damage to our farmers.

The Prime Minister has never followed up on that resolution we passed in the House one night, which members voted for, calling on the federal government to help communicate the real significance of the Calgary declaration to Quebec.

The Speech from the Throne and the Liberal government are completely oblivious to the spirit and the aspirations of the new west. This is a deficiency which is inexcusable in a federal system where the federal government must recognize regional aspirations and respond to them for the sake and well-being of Canadians living in those regions, as well as national unity.

I said there were four strong winds. The wind coming out of the new west is only one. In Ontario, the federal government must recognize and accommodate the aspirations of the common sense revolution. It has not done so and there is little in the Speech from the Throne that indicates it is prepared to do so.

In 1993 the people of Ontario elected the tax cutting, common sense government of Premier Harris to get that province's financial house in order. Premier Harris proceeded to do so by cutting taxes 30%, introducing programs like workfare as preferable to welfare, while still spending 50% more dollars on health care in that one province than this government spends on health care in the entire country.

In 1997 Mr. Harris asked the people of Ontario whether they wanted his government to continue on this common sense course and, in particular, whether they wanted him to continue to cut taxes. Despite the fierce opposition of both federal and provincial Liberals, the Harris government was returned by the people of Ontario with a solid majority. We offer them our heartiest congratulations.

There is a strong wind blowing across Ontario. It is the wind of the common sense revolution. It is completely counterproductive for the largest government in the country, the federal government, to pursue tax policies that are at cross purposes with the tax policies of the largest provincial government. People in Ontario are concerned, like people in Alberta, that tax and spend federal Liberals will move into the hard earned vacated tax room created by the provincial government. They want the principles of the common sense revolution to be respected and implemented in Ottawa as well as Queen's Park. Yet, there is not a flicker of recognition in the Speech from the Throne of that political reality. It fails to recognize, let alone respect, the principal fiscal interest of the largest province in Canada.

I talked about four strong winds. I have two so far. There is an easterly wind beginning to blow in this country. The Atlantic provinces are bestirring themselves in a manner which is good for them and good for the country.

When I talk to business, labour and academic interests in Atlantic Canada I hear a desire to pursue new paths to economic growth; not the tired and discredited Liberal policies of trying to stimulate growth through patronage tainted subsidies, grants and handouts to the few, but new and more credible policies. I will list them: tax relief for the many to put more dollars in the pockets of consumers to spend and Atlantic business to invest; a concerted effort to expand trade between Atlantic Canada and the New England states, which was the basis of the old Atlantic economy before it entered Confederation and in which Atlantic Canada was stronger than it is now; a vigorous effort to expand Atlantic rim trade to make Atlantic Canada the gateway for European-North American trade; rebuilding the infrastructure of the whole east coast through public-private partnerships, but partnerships acceptable to the province and untainted by federal Liberal patronage; creating a tax and investment environment conducive to the growth of the knowledge industry in Atlantic Canada to take advantage of the many excellent institutions of higher learning and to create 21st century jobs for Atlantic Canadian youth close to home.

Some of these policies, and they represent a departure from what the federal government has done, were first proposed and pursued by Premier McKenna of New Brunswick, who has just denounced the federal Liberals' approach to regional economic development in the strongest possible terms. According to a Globe and Mail report, Mr. McKenna has unleashed a scorching indictment of the federal government's treatment of Atlantic Canada. The federal Liberals, he said, have nothing in the window for his region. He speaks of “their total ignorance of the issues of shipbuilding, their total ignorance of the very highly developed information technology sector which is taking place here, their disgraceful management of the fisheries issue and the resource issue having to do with the natives”. All of these things, he said, are just more nails in their coffin.

Premier McKenna's initiatives were largely abandoned by his successor at the provincial level, who paid the price at the polls. In both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia two tired and discredited Liberal administrations have been turned out of office and replaced by the Conservative ministries of Mr. Lord and Dr. Hamm. In both elections the smell of patronage and federal political interference in provincial highway projects was a factor in the defeat of the provincial Liberal administrations, and both of these administrations are seeking to pursue new approaches to economic growth. We extend our heartiest congratulations to both.

The winds of change are blowing in Atlantic Canada. Yet, when we examine the Speech from the Throne, supposedly the speech laying out the legislative program of the federal government which claims it lies awake nights trying to figure out how to make this federation work better, there is no recognition of this regional fact at all, no new principles or visions that respond to the new wind that is blowing out of Atlantic Canada.

That brings me to the fourth wind. The fourth wind that a perceptive and sensitive federal government would be recognizing and seeking to accommodate would be the new wind that is stirring in Quebec. It is still a light breeze, but there are signs in the polls and the political discussion in that province that perhaps up to 15% of the Quebec electorate is open to a third way, une troisième voie: not separation for Canada, not the status quo federalism of the Liberals and the Prime Minister, but reform of the federation with a rebalancing of the powers between the federal and provincial governments for the 21st century, a rebalancing that would strengthen the federal government in some of its key areas of jurisdiction, strengthen the provinces in some of their key areas of jurisdiction, particularly health, education and social assistance, and include jurisdiction for the provinces over language and culture.

Yet, when we examine the Speech from the Throne and the application of the principles of federalism to the maintenance of national unity, what do we see? As I have said, we see nothing that truly recognizes the growing and diverse regional aspirations of the west, Ontario or Atlantic Canada. When it comes to addressing the concerns of Quebec we see nothing of the principle or the vision of a reformed federalism, only a continuation of the status quo plus a veiled reference to defining a federal position on the secession process and question.

I find it absolutely amazing that a government that prides itself on always taking the balanced approach—how many times have we heard it, always seeking the balanced approach between spending and tax cuts, between debt reduction and taxation—when it comes to national unity it takes a totally unbalanced approach. When it comes to national unity and adjusting federalism to accommodate the strains of regional-provincial interests, the government spends 90% of its time thinking about Quebec and 10% of its time thinking about the rest of the country. When it comes to Quebec, the government spends 90% of the time trying to defend and perpetuate an unacceptable status quo. When it comes to advocating something new to provide a way out of the constitutional box for either discontented federalists or for weary nationalists in Quebec, instead of presenting both plan A and plan B in balance so Quebecers understand all their options and the consequences of them, the Speech from the Throne contains no plan A and only a veiled reference to a plan B proposal for federal legislation on the secession referendum process and question.

The Prime Minister must come across in Quebec as the schoolyard bully. When the sovereignists show strength, as in the last referendum, he grovels and promises anything, like constitutional recognition of distinct society which he had opposed for 36 years. However, when he thinks his opponents are weakening, he plays the tough guy who is willing to go to court.

On the question of national unity, Quebecers are used to seeing the Prime Minister playing the blow-hard. That has been his style throughout his political career. The Prime Minister is brave when his adversaries are disorganized, but he makes himself scarce as soon as they begin to rally round.

If federalists are going to speak credibly to Quebecers we must be consistent and balanced. We should recognize that status quo federalism has little appeal in particular to the young. We should not risk a revival of support for separation as a reaction to clumsy miscalculations by status quo federalists. If plan A and plan B are to be presented they must be presented in balance, with plan A representing reform of the federation with the priority being given to communicating it to those who are searching for a third way.

Those are the four big winds that we see blowing across the country. We see nothing in the Speech from the Throne that shows any recognition of them whatsoever, that shows any preparedness to harness them for the benefit of the country in the 21st century and no adjustment of federalism beyond the status quo. In our judgment, this deficiency will not be remedied until there are 150-plus members of parliament from all parts of the country committed to that vision of a reformed federation for the 21st century.

One might ask why there is so much public interest and support throughout the country for things like tax relief, criminal justice reform, the strengthening of families, health care reform and the reform of federal-provincial relations to make them more co-operative and productive, and yet so little principled commitment or action on these fronts in the legislative program of the federal government. The answer lies in the fact that the federal political institutions of the country, in particular this parliament and this House of Commons, are defective in terms of their capacity to accurately assess and represent the public will and to respond democratically to public demands.

This is why Reformers want not simply to reform particular fiscal, social, economic or justice policies of the government. We want to reform the system itself whereby these policies are developed and implemented in the first place. We have a vision of a country and a system of government that is truly democratic, not simply democratic in appearance, not an autocracy where people get a chance to vote for the autocrat every four years, but a genuine democracy where the institutions are truly representative and accountable and where the first allegiance of members of parliament is not to their party or to themselves but to the people who elect them.

We envision a parliament where the upper house is a credit and a complement to democracy, not the disgrace to democracy that it is now. We envision a Senate that is democratically elected with equal numbers per province and effective powers to safeguard and represent regional interests. If the country had a workable Senate, in particular the way the Fathers of Confederation envisioned it to be, the first place where these four regional winds that are blowing would register in Parliament is the Senate. As it is, it is the last place. They could have a hurricane over there and they would not even recognize it as a wind.

We envision a parliament where there is genuine free voting in both the Houses, not just on private members' bills or on exceptional occasions when the government does not want to touch a moral issue with a 10-foot pole, but every day on issues of substance and on government bills and opposition motions of every description.

We envision a house of commons where a prime minister with genuine democratic convictions has risen to his feet. The Prime Minister might want to take some notes on this. We would like to see a prime minister stand in the House and say, “It is not the policy of my government to regard every vote as a vote of confidence in the government. If a government motion is defeated or an opposition motion is carried the government will not resign. It will respect that vote and only resign in response to the passage of an explicit vote of no confidence”.

Can hon. members imagine even for a moment what a difference that one simple change would make to improve the democratic nature of this place? The capacity of every single member to more effectively represent constituents' interests would be increased, in particular when the constituents' will conflicts with the party line. The power of the leaders, in particular the prime minister, to coerce votes would be restrained. Committees would be more independent. They could initiate legislation. Debates would no longer be meaningless, sequential soliloquies because members would actually be free to change their mind or their positions as a result of something that some other member had said. Legislation would be enacted perhaps not in exactly the same form that it was originally introduced by the government, but enacted nevertheless by majority vote and in accordance with a broader cross-section of public and national opinion than would otherwise be the case.

We envision a parliament that regularly invites the public to participate in making major national decisions; a democracy where referendums on key issues are regularly held; where citizens can initiate a referendum if enough of them feel strongly enough about the need for a legislative measure; a democracy where elected officials who abuse their public trust can be fired for cause by an electorate itself through a recall mechanism; a democracy where parliament is willing to give the public a chance to vote in favour of reforms to the electoral system itself, inviting Canadians to choose from among such options as continuation of the first past the post system, adoption of some form of preferential balloting, a system of proportional representation or some combination of these measures.

In other words, we envision a democratic parliamentary system where the principles of genuine democracy, of effective representation, of true accountability, of free votes and of public participation are actually practised and reflected in the day to day operations of our institution.

This is the scale of the demand for democracy that is abroad in the land. We see it in British Columbia where just the prospect of a recall mechanism has the anti-democrats quaking in their shoes, as they should. We see it in Alberta where hundreds of thousands of people went out and participated in a Senate election knowing that the Prime Minister, in all his stubbornness, would not respect their wishes. They went out anyway. They went to the meetings. They marked their ballots in the spirit of democracy.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing for Canadian democrats this summer was a conference held at Bird's Hill Provincial Park in Manitoba by the First Nations Accountability Coalition, a group now representing grassroots aboriginal people from more than 200 first nations communities across the country. What were they talking about? They were talking about fiscal and democratic accountability for on-reserve governments and the department of Indian affairs.

The spirit of democracy is alive in the country. However, when we look at the Speech from the Throne what do we see? Not a flicker of enthusiasm for any of the great democratic principles and reforms that would make the country a model democracy for the 21st century.

People from emerging democracies, some from the former Soviet Union, from Africa and from Asia, visit the House and the Speaker's chambers. They sit in the balcony expecting to see a model democracy. If we handed them the Speech from the Throne they would not guess that there is a commitment to democracy, to democratic reform or to making this democracy work better. It is a shame.

I have devoted almost the entirety of my reply to the Speech from the Throne to demonstrating its greatest flaws: its deficiency in principle and vision. In order to be constructive, I have also endeavoured to outline by contrast the principles and vision to which the official opposition is firmly committed and which we believe should animate and direct the legislative program of the Government of Canada; principles of fiscal responsibility; vigorous encouragement of private enterprise and free markets; principles of social responsibility for law and order and integrity of the family; respect of the line between the courts and the parliament; principles of reformed federalism; and, principles of genuine democracy.

This brings me to my final point. The official opposition is deeply committed to these principles. We have left our homes and our normal occupations to fight for them in elections and in parliament. However, the official opposition is not naive enough or egocentric enough to believe that we have some exclusive monopoly on these principles.

For example, across the country there are hundreds and thousands of supporters and voters for various political parties who believe in the principle of fiscal responsibility, in particular the need for national tax and debt reduction. However, because so many of the people who hold these convictions are divided in their political loyalties between various political parties, between several federal parties, or between provincial parties that espouse these principles and federal parties of the same name that do not, it has not been possible to amass the political support required to elect the 150-plus members needed in this parliament to make real tax reduction and tax relief a reality.

Across the country there are millions of people who would agree in principle that Canada needs to make a new commitment to law and order, to preserving the family and to reforming federal-provincial relations. However, again, because the political loyalties of those people are divided among various political groups, the country ends up being governed by a party that is committed to none of these principles and elected with only 38% of the vote.

It could be argued that if only we could secure some of these democratic reforms I have enumerated, in particular free voting in the House or some change in the electoral system, it would then be much more possible to form temporary or permanent coalitions of members of the House who are committed to the same principles but find themselves currently divided by party lines and loyalties.

There is a catch-22 to that argument. In order to implement those democratic reforms, we need the 150-plus votes required to carry a motion or a bill and no such free voting or committed majority exists in this Chamber at the present time. What is this telling us? What is this telling Canadians? It is telling us that there is a need for a realignment of the party lines in the country in order to implement policies based on widely shared principles and values be they those that I have enumerated or some other set of principles that others may define.

It is to advance the principle of political realignment, the principle that party lines and party structures must be adjusted from time to time to better unite rather than further divide all those who share certain common principles essential to the implementation of public policy conducive to good government, that the official opposition has offered to work with others like-minded, regardless of past party affiliation, to create a principled united alternative to the current administration in time for the next election.

In this partisan House, I am well aware that arguments in favour of co-operation across party lines for the sake of the country usually fall on deaf ears. However, out in the real world where voters and taxpayers live this is not the case.

I believe that increasing numbers of Canadians are watching us with two questions in mind whether or not we as practising politicians want to recognize it. They are watching first to see whether any existing party is willing to make a sincere effort to define new common ground on which large numbers of Canadians could unite in new ways to lower taxes, to heal the health care, to democratize their institutions and to unite our country, all the things the status quo Liberal administration has been unable to provide.

Second, they are watching to see if any existing party is so committed to these principles that it is prepared to set aside its own partisan goals, even if for a moment, and work with others who are like minded, regardless of past party affiliation, in order to implement those principles at the federal level.

Two weekends ago the once great Progressive Conservative Party of Canada said no to both the idea of seeking new common ground and setting aside its own narrow partisan goals to work with others. It will have to live with the consequences of that decision, the kind of inward looking thinking that reduced its representation from 169 seats in the 34th Parliament to 2 seats in the 35th Parliament, that has reduced its party membership from 90,000 a year ago to 18,000 under the current leadership, at least half of whom reject the traditional conservative principles of both fiscal conservatism and free trade.

The Reform Party of Canada and the official opposition in this Chamber has said yes to both those questions. Over the next few months it will continue to explore whether it is possible to build a new principled alternative to the unprincipled and visionless administration in time for a new century.

The original Fathers of Confederation had a dream. We should remember this because a similar challenge was faced by a parliament long ago that created our country. The original Fathers of Confederation had a dream that could not be realized until there was a political realignment in the old parliament of Canada.

I too have a dream of a new and better Canada that requires a political realignment if it is to be fulfilled early in the new millennium. It has sometimes been asked how was it that the original Fathers of Confederation, a group which contained people who wanted to conserve certain old things like the French language and culture and the British connection and which contained people with radical new ideas on federalism and advanced democracy, were able or willing to work together to bring into being the new confederation.

The short answer which has meaning for us today is that the conservers of the old and the advocates of the new learned to bear with one another and to recognize each in the other the necessary complement of their one-sidedness. The defenders of the old need the challenge of new ideas. If they do not have that the old ossifies and eventually decays.

The advocates of change need the influence of the advocates of old principles to constrain them from going too far. If the two can ever bear with one another, one of the products of their doing that at the turn of the last century was the country of Canada itself.

I invite all Canadians who share in their hearts a vision of a better Canada where taxes are lower and government less intrusive; where law and order and the value of the family are enhanced rather than undermined by federal policy; where federal and provincial governments co-operate rather than bicker in a better federal union to provide better health, education and social services for our people; and where federal political institutions like the Senate and the House command a new respect because of their effectiveness and commitment to democratic accountability to work together.

I invite all who share in this vision and the principles on which it rests to work together to remedy the deficiencies in principle and vision that characterize this last gasp throne speech from a tired and visionless administration.

In the meantime I move that the following words be added to the address:

And that this House regrets that your Government has failed through a lack of vision and commitment to sound principles to adequately address the allegations of corruption against it, including the abuse of patronage; failed to bring integrity to Canada's immigration system by allowing organized crime to take advantage of Canadians' generosity and by undermining the standing of legitimate immigrants and genuine refugees; failed to seriously deal with the problems of drug trafficking, youth crime, and child pornography; rejected the common sense policies of other governments, most notably the Ontario and Alberta Governments, of lowering taxes to create jobs and prevent companies, young people, and capital from leaving the country; failed to maintain the supremacy of Parliament in relation to the court; failed to recognize the serious plight of Canadian agriculture and to provide a framework for reorganizing the airline industry; failed to provide for the democratic reform of federal institutions and the reform of federal-provincial relations through the rebalancing of powers; and therefore, having failed to demonstrate the capacity, commitment, and vision required to lead this country into the 21st century, has lost the confidence of this House and the Canadian people.

[The Speaker]

The amendment moved by the Leader of the Opposition is in order. Debate is on the amendment.

[Jean Chrétien, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I begin my remarks today by congratulating the hon. member for Windsor—St. Clair on the excellent speech he made in moving the Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne.

I would also like to congratulate the member for Laval West, who also made an excellent presentation in seconding the address yesterday.

I was very impressed by their presentations and I am sure that they will have a fine career here in the Parliament of Canada.

On behalf of all members of the House I congratulate Her Excellency on assuming her functions as governor general. We all wish her well.

Today we are on the eve of what many predict will be the century of the Pacific. How fitting it is that the remarkable woman who now occupies the highest office in the land is an immigrant from the Pacific, Chinese born, a refugee who came here as a young child with her family, a woman who has made a major contribution to the cultural life of her adopted country.

One hundred years ago who would have predicted that a woman immigrant from China would one day become Governor General of Canada? It is with great pride that I say we have come a long, long way in this wonderful country.

We are now 75 days from the turn of a new century. As the current century draws to a close, the century Laurier predicted would be the century of Canada, it is appropriate to pause and reflect on where we have come from, what we have achieved together and why we enter the next century with such confidence, such hope and such optimism.

It has been said that Canada is a triumph of will over geography and economics, and what a triumph it has been. How easy it would have been for a small population, spread over vast spaces across the entire continent, to succumb to the forces of manifest destiny. But succumb we did not. We grew and we flourished.

How easy it would have been for a small French speaking population, concentrated on the banks of the St. Lawrence, to succumb to the forces of the English speaking North American melting pot. But succumb we did not. We grew and we flourished.

How easy it would have been for our first citizens, the aboriginal people, to succumb to the forces of assimilation. But succumb they did not, and a new relationship is growing and flourishing.

In a century of tyranny Canadians gave their lives in the far corners of the world so that others could live in freedom. Today I would like to pay tribute to the troops who are all over the world at this moment working for peace.

In a century of intolerance Canada became a beacon of freedom. In a century of brutal dictatorships Canada became an advanced pluralistic democracy. In a century of the worst excesses of nationalism Canada became a multicultural post-national society. In a century of human rights oppression Canada embraced a charter of rights and freedoms. In a century of growing gaps between the haves and have nots Canada developed an advanced system of social security and a social safety net.

In a century of great economic progress, from the small agrarian society that it was, Canada has become one of the seven great industrialized countries. In a century of entrepreneurship and innovation, Canada has been at the forefront.

In a century in which artistic creation has had unprecedented growth, Canadians hold a place of honour: from Robertson Davies and Morley Callahan to Gabrielle Roy and Antonine Maillet, from Oscar Peterson to Gordon Lightfoot and Susan Aglukark, from Céline Dion to Atom Egoyan and Denis Arcand and Margo Kane, with new talent appearing every day.

We Canadians have proven to be a very determined people. We have established a distinct Canadian way, a distinct Canadian model. Accommodation of cultures; recognition of diversity; a partnership between citizens and state.

It is a balance that promotes individual freedom and economic prosperity while, at the same time, sharing risks and benefits. The world has sat up and noticed.

President Chirac expressed it so well last month, in Moncton, when he said, and I quote “This Canada, land of first nations, Francophones, and Anglophones, which today stands as an example of linguistic and cultural diversity, as an object of value and everyday life”.

The world values what we have accomplished. It wants us to succeed. And succeed we have, and succeed we will. We will build on our strengths. We will take bold action for the future. The Canadian way will be a model, setting standards for the whole world.

We all know that there are some in Canada who will judge the success of countries solely by how much money they can make. Ironically, many of those who today judge us harshly on our economic policy have actually made a great deal of money in Canada.

That is certainly not the only criterion for judging success, nor should it be the only criterion for governing. Life is about more than just making money. There may be other countries that are better for those who are already very well off. I am not sure, but there may be. However, if I have to choose between decisions that make life better for those in the middle and for those who have less or decisions for those who already have a great deal, I know how I choose. I know how this government chooses and I know how Canadians choose. We choose the Canadian way.

We have every reason to be very proud of what we have accomplished. We have every reason to be full of hope, of confidence and optimism for the future. That does not mean that everything in Canada is as it should be for everyone. It is not. That does not mean that everything is as it can be and must be for everyone. It is not. There is no room for complacency. There is no room for self-satisfaction. There is a lot of room for rolling up our sleeves, looking forward and working harder together.

We have much work left to do, not only for this parliament but for the next parliament as well. With an appreciation for our past, boldness of vision and the courage to act, we can take what is clearly the best country in the world in which to live and make it better for everyone.

Our vision of the Canada of the 21st century is clear: a society of excellence with a commitment to success, a strong and united country, a dynamic economy, a creative and innovative population, a diverse and cohesive society where prosperity is not limited to the few, but is shared by many. It is a Canada where every child gets the right start in life, where young people have a chance to grow and be the best at whatever they want to do, where citizens have access to the skills and knowledge they need to excel. It is a Canada where citizens, regardless of income, receive quality health services, where families enjoy safe communities and a clean environment and where we work together with other countries to promote peace, cultural diversity and the human purpose and benefits of the new global economy. It is a country, Canada, that is the place to be in the 21st century, the place where people want to come and stay, to learn, to pursue opportunities, to raise children, to enjoy natural beauty, to open new frontiers and to set the standard for the world for a high quality of life. It is a Canada that is a leader and an example to the world.

Today, I want to set out a comprehensive strategy that enables Canadians and their governments, working together, to turn this vision into reality, a comprehensive strategy for leadership in the knowledge-based economy and for promoting our interests and projecting our values in the world, a strategy that integrates the economy, social policy and the environment, a strategy faithful to the Canadian way.

We cannot do everything. But that which the national government can do, we must do wisely and well. We must set ambitious, concrete objectives, and work with Canadians to achieve them. That is what leadership is really about.

That is why the government is setting out both five-year objectives and concrete steps over the next two years to achieve them.

Above all, a strong economy is the indispensable foundation for all we can do and all we want to do.

The government's economic strategy is clear and comprehensive; it is to make Canada a world leader in the next century.

When we took office six years ago, we had a plan. We have followed our plan. It is working. And we will continue to follow it.

We are now in a position to build on it by setting ambitious new goals and objectives for the next five years. We have to build a common vision of how Canada will take on the world, and win, in the 21st century.

We have to think globally.

We have to brand Canada, at home and abroad, as a dynamic and skilled knowledge-based economy. And we must do these things faster than our global competitors, because speed wins.

But to compete on an equal footing, we first had to restore the country's fiscal health.

The era of growing debt and large deficits is now behind us once and for all. The budget will be balanced in each and every year through the life of this Parliament and beyond, something that we have not seen for generations, for at least 50 years.

In each and every year, instead of adding to the national debt, we will pay it down. The debt to GDP ratio will decrease year after year, after year.

The economy is growing strongly and sustainably. Canadians are more optimistic about the economy and their individual prospects today than they have been for a long, long time.

Unemployment is lower than it has been in almost a decade and more Canadians are working today than ever before in our history. The country is on the right track. We are very well positioned to be a world leader in the new economy.

A lot of people deserve credit for the economic success of the last six years, but no one more than the Minister of Finance. I want to express to him my personal gratitude as Prime Minister, the gratitude of his colleagues in caucus and cabinet, and that of all Canadians.

With the fiscal house in order, with the strong and growing economy, we can move forward boldly to implement our economic strategy, to strengthen the economic and social fabric of Canada and to seize the opportunities of a new century.

The government, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and the Liberal Party have been and are committed to reducing taxes as the finance of the nation improves. We have already started and we will carry on. But lower taxes are not an end in themselves. They are an essential part of an economic strategy to provide jobs, growth, rising incomes and a higher quality of life.

We began targeted tax relief even before the budget was balanced. As soon as the books were balanced the Minister of Finance introduced broad based tax relief. The budgets of 1998 and 1999 have together cut taxes by $16.5 billion over a three year period.

This is a good beginning, but it is only a beginning. Now we will do more in a responsible and sustained way, year after year after year. With continuing improvements in the financial health of the nation we will do more to reduce taxes in the years ahead.

In the next budget the Minister of Finance will outline a multi-year tax reduction strategy to ensure that Canadian families have more income in their pockets than they had when we started as government, and that Canadian businesses are better able to compete in the global knowledge based economy.

Tax reduction is only one part of the equation. A comprehensive, balanced economic strategy requires investment, public and private, in children, knowledge, creativity, innovation, health and the environment. It also requires maintaining flexibility to meet urgent needs such as the problems in agriculture today in western Canada.

Contrary to the Reform Party, this government is helping farmers with programs. It is against that. I hope people will note that.

This government committed itself at the beginning of this mandate to using 50% of any surplus for tax and debt reduction and the other 50% for investment in economic and social needs that will increase our quality of life over the long term.

There is a growing Canadian consensus that this is the right approach, that this balanced approach is the Canadian way. In August in Quebec City we saw agreement on that from Tory premiers from the west and from Atlantic Canada. The NDP governments were there as were Mike Harris and Lucien Bouchard. In fact, Premier Harris read from the red book. He saw that as real common sense and that is why he approved of it. I do not blame him. I applaud him. He has to like it.

Our comprehensive strategy to make Canada the place to be in the 21st century means focusing on children, on knowledge, on youth, on health and on the environment.

The best place to start is with Canada's children. If we want the brightest future possible for our country, we must ensure that all our children have the best possible start in life.

Our plan for the next two to five years is comprehensive: one, increased maternity and parental leave benefits; two, a federal-provincial agreement on more supports for early childhood development; three, more after tax money in the hands of families; four, more family friendly workplaces; five, modernization of family law; six, a third significant investment in the national child benefit; and seven, strengthened learning opportunities through an expanded SchoolNet. Real support for Canadian families in the Canadian way.

Let me elaborate on three aspects of our strategy.

There is now overwhelming scientific evidence that success in a child's early years is the key to long term healthy development. Nothing is more important than for parents to be able to spend the maximum amount of time with newborn children in the critical early months of a child's life.

Therefore, I am proud to announce today that the government will introduce legislation in this parliament to extend employment insurance maternity and parental benefits from the current maximum of six months to one full year.

We will make these benefits more flexible to meet the different needs of families. We will make them more accessible by increasing the number of parents eligible for support. This will be in effect no later than January 1, 2001.

Together with the provinces, we have begun to put in place the national children's agenda to improve supports for families and children.

I believe this work has to be accelerated.

Provincial premiers think so as well and discussed this last summer. We must move as quickly as possible from talk to action.

Today I challenge all governments to have in place by December 2000 a federal-provincial agreement consistent with the social union framework to strengthen community supports for early childhood development, an agreement on principles and objectives, on measuring outcomes and reporting to Canadians, as well as an agreement on a five-year timetable for increased federal and provincial funding to achieve our shared objectives.

We have demonstrated over the last three years that federal and provincial governments can work together to help families with children. The national child benefit is an outstanding example of federal-provincial collaboration.

We must now continue toward our goal that parents will no longer have to choose between a job and benefits for their children. Too often, we have seen people turn down jobs because they might lose their government benefits. Under the system we have introduced, in collaboration with provincial governments, people are motivated to keep their job because they are not penalized for working, as they were in the past.

We will therefore—and this is very important—make a third significant investment in the national child benefit for low income families with children, to be in place no later than July 1, 2001.

And we will seek a commitment from the provinces, who have all asked for this further federal contribution, to build on our investment by increasing their own investments in early childhood development.

Many years ago, Canadians and their governments, Liberal governments, I may add, of my predecessors, Mr. Pearson and Mr. Trudeau, committed themselves to a bold and noble objective.

In a country as prosperous as ours, senior Canadians should not be denied the security and dignity of an income.

We did not build our system of old age security and public pensions overnight. But we focused on our goal and, by and large, we succeeded.

Let us today make another ambitious commitment, this time a commitment to take the action necessary as a country, all levels of government working in partnership together with communities and the voluntary sector, so that every Canadian child can have the best possible start in life.

What kind of world will these children live in? Well, we can see it already. And we can also see how they will succeed. We enter a new century at a time of rapid change, the scope and speed of which the world has never seen.

It was a Canadian, Marshall McCluhan, who coined the phrase “global village”. Our researchers no longer compete with each other; they are in competition every day with the whole world. Our industries no longer compete locally; they compete globally. Globalization and technology have redefined the concept of the marketplace. This has a major implication for public policy.

To seize the opportunities of the new knowledge based economy requires a comprehensive and ambitious strategy. We have begun this in the last six years.

Our goal is for Canada to be known around the world as the place to be, the place of exciting opportunities.

If we set the right objectives, if we make the right investments, if we create the right partnerships and if we work together as a country, not only will we keep the best and the brightest in Canada, but we will attract the best and the brightest from around the world to Canada. And we will give more people in Canada the chance to become the best and the brightest.

The knowledge based industries which will provide the jobs of the future require access to a diverse range of skills close at hand to support them.

This is much easier for a large country like the United States to achieve than it is for a relatively small country like Canada. If we want to attract the investment Canada needs, we have to establish a type of critical mass and we can only do it through collaboration between governments, our universities, research institutions and the private sector.

Today our challenge as a country is to create a climate of opportunity for our graduate students and our graduates and to provide exciting opportunities for Canadian researchers and to attract the best academic researchers in the world to Canadian universities, and to do so at a time when worldwide competition for them has never been so fierce. And particularly at a time when United States universities benefit from both permanent endowments and the generosity of private foundations out of all proportion to those of our universities.

Over the years through the granting councils, the Medical Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Government of Canada has been far and away the largest contributor to university research in our country.

In recent years the granting councils have contributed to the pursuit of excellence by creating and supporting hundreds of research chairs in our universities. They are now prepared to build on what they have already begun.

The heads of the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, working with some university presidents, in particular Dr. Robert Lacroix, the rector of the Université de Montréal, and Dr. Martha Piper, the president of UBC, have come to the government with an exciting and ambitious proposal.

They want to build on existing partnerships between our universities, the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, to brand Canada around the world as the place to be for knowledge creation as we enter the 21st century, to enable Canadian universities to create outstanding research opportunities for the best and brightest Canadians.

They want to make Canada a place where Canadian students and graduates want to be, and to attract the global research stars of today and the future research stars of tomorrow, to attract to Canada some of the world's best minds from other countries and to create an environment to produce Canadian Nobel prize winners in the future. It is a plan for brain gain, not brain drain.

They have proposed a plan to establish over the next three years 1,200 new 21st century chairs for research excellence in universities across Canada.

They want to provide enough financial support for the total costs of research for each new research chair to make them internationally competitive and to set as an objective reaching a total of 2,000 new chairs for research excellence across Canada as soon as possible thereafter.

It is a plan I welcome and we welcome on this side of the House. It is a plan for excellence and international competitiveness which the government endorses enthusiastically. We will provide the required funding to the granting councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. This investment in our granting councils to promote research and the quest for excellence will truly make Canada a leader in the knowledge based economy and will truly brand Canada as a country that values excellence and is committed to success, a country that is the place to be in the 21st century.

This is not all. We will introduce legislation in the next few weeks to create the Canadian institutes of health research to ensure that Canada stays in the forefront of health research, to create a more integrated system of health related research than in any other country, to ensure the pursuit of excellence in health research, to keep the best and brightest practitioners in Canada, and to attract to Canada the best and brightest from everywhere.

With the Canada millennium scholarship fund, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the 21st century chairs for research excellence and the Canadian institutes of health research, the government is putting in place a sweeping and comprehensive strategy for putting Canada in the forefront of the knowledge based economy of the 21st century.

Getting Canadians connected, to each other, to schools and libraries, to our diverse stories and voices, to government, to the marketplace and to the world, is one of the key elements in establishing Canada as a world leading economy and as a country of opportunity.

We must aim to be the most connected country in the world, a country which uses these connections in a dynamic and original way. Our goal is to make Canada a world leader in the smart use of electronic ways of doing business and to encourage the rapid use of e-commerce throughout the economy.

Today, I challenge all sectors of our country, private and public, government and business, to work together toward the goal of capturing 5% of the world share of e-commerce for Canada by the year 2003, and to do over $200 billion of business in this way.

By 2004, our goal is to be the most electronically connected government in the world to its citizens, so that Canadians can access all government information and services on-line at the time and place of their choosing.

Our success in the future will as never before depend on a population committed to learning, adapting to change, at ease with new technologies and the digital economy, and able to master new media.

Our ability to continue to lead in the world demands a commitment to ensuring that young Canadians have opportunities to acquire direct experience in these areas.

By March 31, 2001, 6,000 new community access sites will be established in urban and rural Canada, to ensure that all Canadians, regardless of geographic location, have affordable access to the Internet. To ensure they have the skills required to use new information technology, we will recruit up to 10,000 young Canadians to train community members of all ages.

The quality of our lives and the future strength of our society require a new generation of Canadians who have the skills of citizenship and leadership, who understand themselves and their country, and who are open to the world.

Our government has committed to an accord with the voluntary sector that will lay the foundation for a new, more effective partnership in the service of Canadians. We will work together to build a national volunteer initiative to mark the International Year of the Volunteer in the year 2001.

In collaboration with the voluntary sector the government will create a single window service called Exchanges Canada to give 100,000 young Canadians every year the chance to learn about another part of Canada, to live and experience another culture and language.

To develop projects in the arts, sports, science and community development, the development and maintenance of a strong basic infrastructure as well as a knowledge infrastructure are also key components of a competitive economy for the 21st century.

The environment, water and air quality, public health, tourism, transportation, telecommunications and cultural infrastructure must be well planned to meet the needs of a modern economy in urban Canada and in rural Canada. It will require partnership, federal, provincial, municipal and the private sector. It will require new resources from all the partners. It will require a commitment over the years. Therefore we will seek to reach an agreement with our provincial and municipal partners by no later than the end of next year to begin in 2001, or before if possible, a five year modern national infrastructure program for Canada.

In the new global economy a healthy environment and high quality of life go hand in hand. This is a matter of very high priority for the government. The environment is of importance to all Canadians and particularly to young Canadians. Our generation will be judged on the environmental legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren. Environmental quality is both a local and a global challenge. It requires both national action and international partnership.

Legislation will be introduced in this session of parliament to protect species at risk and their critical habitat. We will continue to extend Canada's national parks system. We will clean up contaminated sites in the country and protect the health of Canadians.

Canada enters the next century with enormous advantages. In an era of globalization we are a multicultural society whose people have roots in almost every country of the world. We are an Atlantic, a Pacific and an Arctic country. We belong both to the Commonwealth and to the Francophonie. We speak to the world through the values we have developed at home and we speak in two international languages.

As such we are well placed to promote human security and cultural diversity. We have earned a respected place in the world community. Over the last six years we have taken significant initiatives to help achieve shared international objectives like the land mines treaty and the International Criminal Court. We participated very actively at the beginning in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. We took a leadership role in Haiti and now we are in East Timor.

In the post-cold war world it is more and more possible for foreign policy to focus not only on the relations between states but on the needs of people, needs that transcend borders. We are seeing the human side of globalization, human security, cultural diversity and human rights. The more people are safe and secure in their own countries, the more Canadians can live in safety and security at home, and our quality of life will be higher.

Our objective is to make a difference by using our ingenuity, the history of our international achievements and the respect with which Canada is held in the world to make progress on the human security agenda and to recognize that in a difficult world there will always be more progress to be made.

We are a very fortunate country. We are an affluent country. We have an obligation to do our part to help those who are very poor. This is our obligation to our fellow human beings. This too is the Canadian way. Therefore we will increase our international development assistance.

The foreign policy through which we project our values, coupled with the trade oriented economy and vigorous promotion of trade and investment interests, will make Canada very well positioned for the global economy of the 21st century.

This afternoon I have spoken about the country that we are so proud of, the country that we have built so well in the 20th century.

Today I have set out a comprehensive strategy for Canadian leadership in the knowledge-based economy and for promoting our interests and projecting our values in the world, a vision for the Canada of the 21st century and a plan to achieve it, a vision of the Canadian model, a modern project of a society, the project of a forward-looking country.

These are not old solutions to the problems of today, but new plans to meet new opportunities. It is a strategy to ensure that the opportunities of all of Canada are available to all Canadians; a strategy to ensure that Canadians shape their future in the Canadian way; a strategy for people, for opportunity, for excellence, for success, for a high quality of life, for sharing, dignity and mutual respect, for creativity and innovation.

It is a realistic strategy for a realistic country, a caring strategy for a caring country, a modern strategy for a modern country, an ambitious strategy for an ambitious country and a bold strategy for a bold country. It is a strategy for the future for a country of the future, a country that is open to the world and willing to lead.

Canadians are not a boastful people. We are not given to flag waving or emotional excesses. In a century, indeed in a millennium, that has seen so much bloodshed over differences of faith, race and nationality, perhaps that is a good thing. Instead, with quiet confidence we have adopted a Canadian way of living together, resolving differences, reasoning together and creating what is quite simply the best country in the world in which to live.

I began today by referring to the famous remark of Sir Wilfrid Laurier about the 20th century belonging to Canada. I do not know if the 21st century will belong to Canada, but I do know something even more important: Canada belongs to the 21st century and Canada will be the place to be in the 21st century. The world has seen the future and it is Canada.