Madam Speaker, I do not question the goodwill of the mover of the motion and I do not question the compassion that has been very well expressed by pretty well all the speakers on the opposition side today.
I admit that some of the social ills that have been described by the members of the opposition do exist. But I reject the basic premise of their arguments that suggests all the social problems are based on the actions of the government. Nowhere in any of their remarks did I hear mention of the changes that have been happening all around the globe. The whole world is in the middle of something called the technological revolution. Some people view this as a period of transition and turmoil between the industrial age and the information age. Historically such revolutionary periods are periods of social dislocation. Some people who live during those periods adjust quickly to these changes and they prosper, but others find these periods of change difficult and they experience economic insecurity.
To govern during such a period of economic revolution is both a privilege and a challenge.
Unlike the opposition, this government is not looking nostalgically backward to a safer time and wanting to revive and apply the solutions of the past. We do not want to go back to a time, for example, when unemployment insurance was mainly a passive income support system, a system which encouraged people, generation after generation, to languish in semi-poverty with little hope of a better future.
We want to motivate and actively support Canadians to enter the labour market of the 1990s. For example, our youth employment strategy and our Canada jobs fund are helping young people across the country and workers in areas of high unemployment to get on board the train that is rushing us forward toward the 21st century.
We are proud of our post-TAGS program for fishers and our package for Devco miners because these packages prove that we are not abandoning some people who are in trouble; our family supplement for families on EI; our national children's benefit; our removal of 400,000 low income Canadians from the tax rolls, our recognition on our part that some Canadians are struggling and that we want to help them.
At the same time, though, it must be recognized that this government has created the right climate of no deficit, low interest rates, low inflation and lowering taxes, the climate most conducive to job creation and, I might say, a climate the previous government tried to achieve and failed.
We are also proud of our ever decreasing unemployment rate, another phenomenon the previous government failed to achieve.
There is no purpose in being outraged at poverty. It is far more intelligent to be looking at its causes to understand where we are in the historical evolution of the country and to apply measures to alleviate that poverty as we are doing. We want to bounce people back into the labour force because a job is the best economic security we can provide and we are doing those things.
However, we are not denying that there are social problems out there, poverty and homelessness. We approaching them one by one because they are tasks of work to be done. This government has its shoulder to the wheel. It has its intentions in the right place. As we have sufficient money to tackle of these problems, one at time we will tick them off the list that the opposition has provided us with today.