Madam Speaker, this hon. member does not think much of that suggestion.
Behind the initiative of a North American currency is corporate America. The BCNI headed up by our friend Thomas D'Aquino said that the best thing for Canada to make us highly productive was to privatize, to adopt free trade, to deregulate, to balance the budget, to impose the GST, to cut social programs, which would make us more like the United States and that would boost our productivity.
We have done all those things. We as a country followed the advice of the BCNI. We followed the agenda of the corporate voices of Canada, which are the voices behind the Euro and the voices behind this call now for a North American or Pan-American currency.
The problem, as we read in the papers today, is that we are not that productive. Having taken all of these steps, Canada has not increased its productivity. What is absent from this discussion is the high level of unemployment and underemployment and the relatively low wages people are being paid and therefore the relative lack of purchasing power. Those are some of the reasons we have to discuss.
Rather than discuss a North American currency, I would go along with my friend's partner, the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Jean, and talk about the growing gap between the rich and the poor in Canada, the growing gap between the rich nations and poor nations. That kind of discussion would have much more merit than talking about integrating Canada's currency with that of the United States of America.