The member from Surrey just reminded me that it is taxpayer money once again. I shudder to think that I have been here six years and I forget that important little point, and I do not.
The industry department issued a paper which supports the rapid divestiture of crown assets. This makes me wonder why the department is sponsoring the bill in the first place.
I refer to a paper in the House entitled “Canada in the 21st Century—Institutions in Growth—Framework Policy as a Tool of Competitive Advantage for Canada”. This sounds like it is going to cost Canadians a lot of money. If we start getting academics trying to figure out how to spend taxpayers' money, it could be a pretty sad situation.
The point is that in comparison to other OECD countries, Canada has had historically high levels of state ownership. In a country that is considered primarily a free enterprise country, a country where the people of Canada should take a role in private enterprise, the private sector and industry, Canada has a very unusually high level of state ownership. That is a little scary.
In 1986 the Economic Council of Canada reported that government owned and controlled companies accounted for 26% of the net fixed assets of all Canadian corporations in 1983. That is pretty astounding and pretty shocking. Yet these firms accounted for less than 5% of the total employment in the country. They accounted for 26% of the net fixed assets of all the Canadian corporations, yet less than 5% of the total employment. This adds even more credibility to the fact that the private sector is the best place to create jobs. The government should recognize that instead of trying to usurp the efforts of private sector industry in helping our economy.
These numbers do not say very much about the employment creation capacities of government owned crown corporations and companies. I would like to share my time with my colleague from the Okanagan.