Madam Speaker, I am becoming concerned about members of the Reform Party and their ability to develop myths. I choose that word so that I can be parliamentary. The bigger the myth the better.
For example, they are paranoid about first nations people and they build the myth that one of the more disadvantaged minorities in Canada is somehow taking over the country.
Another big myth which they develop has to do with crime. They are obsessed with crime, with petty crime. They deliberately build up a fearmongering approach, ignoring the fact that statistics show that crime has been decreasing in Canada. They build a myth instead of presenting the real facts.
In this debate we have heard members of the Reform Party build another myth. It is the myth of top down big government. Among other things, that myth demeans the other levels of government including the municipalities.
There was a time when the members opposite could have been members of parliament here, they could have been MLAs and they could have been local councillors all at the same time. That was the way it was in Canada. At that time power was held by a clique. That clique of people, almost all of them men, held all of those positions.
Since that time what has happened is that we have not developed a top down government. That is what it was in those days. A small group of people held every level of government in their hands. Since then we have developed a truly strong, decentralized democracy, arguably the most effective decentralized democracy in the world.
Instead of there being a pyramid with the federal government at the top and the municipalities at the bottom, the reality is that we have three levels of government which are something like three Olympic rings. Each of them is fully democratic, fully elected, with great powers of raising taxes, with great powers of spending taxes and making decisions in their sphere of interest.
Those three areas of government overlap, just like the Olympic rings. I am not allowed to use props, but if I could, I could show how the overlapping works. They have large areas of their own responsibility and there is a small area in the middle where there is responsibility which is federal, provincial and municipal.
Those rings are in my mind. I do not know how those members work and they may work in a top down fashion, but in my riding I work out of my ring with the other three rings. We work very effectively. Where there is overlap, we work together to deal with the issues concerned. I would suggest that those rings are the main checks and balances in Canada. That is how our people are represented at various levels.
I believe that in the discussion the members of the Reform Party have been demeaning the municipalities and the goodwill and the judgment of people at the local level. If they are so cynical, so biased, so uninformed about the role of the particular ring which is the federal government, why do they not simply run at the municipal level?