Madam Speaker, I have heard some funny things in this House, but the intervention by the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood in which he suggests that government intervention has been beneficial to the economy of western Canada is one of the funniest that I have ever heard.
He referred specifically to the CPR and to the western oil industry. I grant you that the railways in general owed their existence to the intervention of the federal government, but I would also venture to say that the people of western Canada paid for those interventions tenfold, twentyfold, thirtyfold while they were raped by the railways, by the central Canadian establishment sucking the resources out of the west and putting nothing back.
As far as our oil industry goes, the only federal intervention of any consequence that I am aware of in the petroleum industry was the national energy program, which was designed to murder the oil industry in western Canada and very nearly succeeded. We had refugees from Alberta all over the country trying to escape what was done to the industry by the Liberal predecessor to this federal government.
Because the member for Broadview—Greenwood is acknowledged to be quite knowledgeable on taxation, I would like to put a question to him. If we are going to have equalization payments, and I do not think anybody in any party in this House would say that we should not, why do we have to have these dreadful convoluted formulae tying them to God knows what? Why could we not just simply have a transfer of funds, a cheque from Ottawa to the have not provinces based solely on per capita GDP in those provinces and get away from all of this crazy bureaucracy? Why not?