Mr. Speaker, at the outset of my remarks, as we are responding to the Speech from the Throne that opened this session of parliament, I would once again like to thank the people of my riding of Ottawa South for their continuing support. I believe it is a great privilege to serve as a member of the House of Commons and I am proud to serve my constituents, as well as the people of Canada, in my capacity as Minister of Industry.
I am also very proud to have the opportunity to respond to the Speech from the Throne which I believe lays out a balanced agenda and establishes a solid foundation for the government to move forward into the 21st century.
It is among the chief responsibilities of the Minister of Industry to try to prepare the nation for the challenges of the future, knowing that what the world we will face in a decade will probably differ from the nineties even more than this decade has differed from the eighties. This is the reason I have dedicated myself over the past six years to helping foster innovation, science, research and development, and connectedness.
Year by year, our government has endeavoured to help Canadians build a new economy through policies and programs whose sights have been set on the 21st century.
For example, we invested a billion dollars in the Canada Foundation for Innovation to help build the research infrastructure in Canada.
We created the Canada millennium scholarship fund. This January, we will begin generating over 100,000 scholarships each year to low- and middle-income post-secondary students.
We launched an Information Highway agenda—Connecting Canadians—to make Canada the most connected country in the world by the year 2000. Let is looks at some of the results.
In Rankin Inlet in the High Arctic people have made the transition from an isolated and remote community to the global exchange of ideas and commerce. The Internet gives them a window on the world and opens an opportunity for them to express themselves to the world.
In Dawson Creek, British Columbia, Gordon Curries, working out of his home office, beat out the competition from the big international publishing houses to win the contract to produce the official coffee table book on the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
In York, Prince Edward Island, Vesey's Seeds has used electronic commerce to increase sales equivalent to opening a brand new store with none of the overhead costs that would have been the case otherwise.
Lanark County in Ontario, not far from Ottawa, has its model on its website that speaks of the ability of the net to make distance irrelevant. “Ten seconds to Tokyo, ten minutes to the cottage, what a life” is its slogan.
Our policies, our priorities, and our investments have made an impact on the lives of Canadians. But the government can make investments in tomorrow because it has restored sanity to the nation's finances today.
Canadians enabled us to achieve a balanced budget because they were prepared to endure sacrifices, allowing us to consider how to allocate surpluses rather than how to reduce deficits.
The Speech from the Throne continues to build on these investments. It continues the same balanced approach that has succeeded so well over the past six years. At the same time, it commits this government to keeping the ratio of debt to GDP on a permanent downward track, and it promises a multi-year plan for tax reduction.
I would like to speak about an important objective of the throne speech, creating a dynamic economy for the 21st century. Our goal is as simple as branding Canada as one of the most forward looking and innovative nations in the world.
When future generations look back at the turbulent years on the cusp of the new millennium, they will see that some nations thrived in the midst of change. They rallied to the new demands of creating knowledge and applying it to new products and processes. When those future generations look back at who thrived in the transition to the new millennium, they will conclude that Canada was the place to be.
The 1999 Speech from the Throne reinforces the government's commitment to its long term strategy for building a more innovative economy. By deepening its action in five priority areas of its microeconomic agenda: connectedness, innovation, marketplace frameworks, trade and investment, the government continues its drive to ensure that Canada is a winner in the globalized knowledge based economy. It will make major investments in productivity enhancing actions, productivity that will continue to sustain one of the highest standards of living in the world and improve the quality of life of all Canadians.
With the Chairs in Research Excellence program, the government has committed to work with the universities to create 1,200 new 21st century chairs in research excellence over the next three years. We have set a goal of 2,000 of these new chairs in research excellence. The chairs will enable Canadian universities to continue to attract the best graduate and post-doctoral students that can create real excitement around research in Canadian universities.
Research will be collaborative. In the 21st century, research will not be a solitary pursuit, conducted in the isolation of separate ivory towers. It will involve team-building and co-operation, domestically and internationally, so that innovation moves through the continuum from pure research to new products and processes. We will foster international collaboration and networking by Canadian researchers in universities and institutes, including the federal research facilities. In the area of technological development, we will encourage the development of technologies in every phase of the innovation continuum. This includes research collaboration in genomics, climate change and advanced engineering, trade promotion for biotechnology, information technology, and environmental technologies.
On market development, we will help to find new markets for the products of Canadian innovation and ingenuity. We will help to ensure that new innovations developed by researchers in our universities and government laboratories translate into new products in the marketplace.
Foreign investment is investment that brings with it technological innovation and improved access to the markets of our trading partners. It is investment that helps make Canadian industry more forward looking and more outward looking. We will replicate the highly successful team Canada model of trade initiatives and with our partners in business and the provincial governments will create investment team Canada.
In the Speech from the Throne we stated our commitment to make the investment community more aware of the unique opportunities for investment and growth in Canada. We said: “We will modernize legislation to make it easier for global corporations to locate their headquarters in Canada”. Consistent with this commitment, we will put forward amendments to the Canada Business Corporations Act to ensure that it provides an operating environment that can attract and retain the world's best firms.
In particular we will propose to reduce the current residency requirement for the board of directors of companies incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act from a majority to 25%.
This requirement will not apply to corporations where there are ownership restrictions. We recognize that a modern framework legislation must provide globally-oriented Canadian companies with the flexibility to build their global markets, investments and partnerships for the benefit of Canadians and jobs in Canada.
I am very pleased that many initiatives in the Speech from the Throne advance an agenda that has been a personal priority for me in my six years as industry minister. I refer to the Connecting Canadians initiative.
We have already gone a long way to making Canada the most connected nation in the world. Last March, Industry Canada's SchoolNet program linked a three-student school in Pictou Island, Nova Scotia, to the Internet.
With that, Canada achieved a visionary goal. Every Canadian public school, first nations school and public library wanting to be connected by the SchoolNet partnership has been brought on line. Canada has won a race where speed was of the essence. It is a race where the countries of the world that can train their populations with Internet skills will enjoy the benefits of a knowledge based economy. We are the first country in the world to build such an extensive education network, a network that connects these schools and their communities to the world.
In this session of parliament, we will push forward on the next phase of our SchoolNet program. We will increase classroom access to high speed Internet service. We will stimulate the production of Canadian multimedia content and applications.
We will recruit up to 10,000 young people to help Canadians to become better users of the Internet. These young people will train those in their communities who want to learn how to go on line and how to use the wealth of information that is available to them in that medium. They will help small businesses set up websites and use e-commerce. They will ensure the community access sites have the expertise needed for the delivery of government services over the net.
A fundamental goal of our Connectedness Agenda has been to make government a model user of the information highway—to become known around the world as the government most connected to its citizens. We aim to achieve this by 2004.
We will do this, in part, through an Internet site that will serve as a personal gateway for Canadians wanting government information and community content. The Internet site will also lead the world to Canadian businesses.
Finally, I do not want to leave the topic of our Connectedness Agenda without emphasizing our commitment to finishing the work we started in the last session to make Canada a centre of excellence in e-commerce.
By the end of the year 2000, we intend to have the most attractive policy environment for electronic commerce in the world. We are building a policy framework that deals with: encryption technology, public key infrastructure, consumer protection, electronic signatures, equitable tax treatment of virtual transactions, and standards to ensure the interoperability of networks and applications.
These are the cornerstones of electronic commerce. The government has reintroduced and the House has adopted the personal information protection and electronic documents act. It will protect personal and business information in the digital world and recognize electronic signatures. It is part of our vision to connect Canadians, to promote innovation in Canada and to brand Canada as a world leader in the knowledge based economy.
The Prime Minister has challenged Canadian businesses, especially small businesses, to take advantage of the opportunities for electronic commerce. He has challenged all sectors of Canada's economy to capture 5% of the world share of e-commerce by 2003. That would equate to $200 billion in business every year.
The government has looked at the opportunities of the future as well as the challenges. We have identified the gaps that remain in our ability to meet those demands. Through a comprehensive agenda of policies and programs, we will fill those gaps. We will fill them with targeted programs and at the same time continue the prudent, balanced approach to making the best possible use of taxpayers' money. In this way we make Canada the place to be for all those who want to be part of a dynamic, forward looking, knowledge based economy.
I want especially to commend the vision shown by the Prime Minister in promoting an agenda that looks forward to how Canadians will prosper in the next century. His vision has ensured that the government's agenda is built on programs that will promote science and technology, research and development, and skills and knowledge. He has promoted an agenda for innovation. With this vision, Canada will be the best place to live in the next century.
