Madam Speaker, I rise to make a few brief observations on the worthwhileness and the relevance of the hon. member's private member's motion. It is probably more timely than the member might have thought, although I realize he probably initially regretted that the motion did not come forward at an earlier time and therefore had to seek the unanimous consent of the House to amend it and take out the reference to 1998.
It just so happens that in 1999 we are in a position where we can see the wisdom of the idea we find in the motion, that the world should be more focused on conflict prevention than it has been and that Canada should convene a meeting or act in other ways to bring together like-minded nations that would like to reform our international institutions in a way which would make this kind of conflict prevention more possible and more probable.
It is a timely debate. From my point of view and the point of view of my party, although I realize this is Private Members' Business, reform of our international institutions has certainly been a focus of ours for a long time. Just the other day, again in the context of Private Members' Business, the House unanimously passed a motion by the NDP member for Regina—Qu'Appelle on the issue of the Tobin tax, which in a way addresses itself to an element of what is wrong with the global economy and what is wrong with it in a way that has come to prevent or limit the actions of international financial institutions.
One of the problems we have with respect to the global economy and the international financial institutions is that they were designed for a global economy that was much less globalized and much more regulated. One of the problems we are facing now is the massive deregulation of capital and capital flows.
This has created a new opportunity for the destabilization of national economies, the destabilization of regions, and it is one of the reasons we need to work as an international community on what might be loosely called a new Bretton Woods or a new way of regulating the global economy, to do for the global economy what we once did for national economies; that is to say, to make sure in the way we once made sure national economies worked in the national interest, in the public interest for the common good, we now need to regulate the global economy to replicate in terms of global institutions those things we once did only at the national level.
Otherwise we would end up with this totally unfettered global marketplace in which we see what many have called a race to the bottom; that is to say, a bondage to a certain notion of competition. This means that countries have to cater in an uncritical way to the needs of foreign investment and international capital, which leads to a driving down of wages and a reduction in government revenues, which in turn leads to cutbacks in social programs and the ability of government to act on behalf of the public, both in terms of providing social programs and in terms of legislating in respect of labour and environmental standards or anything else that might be construed to make us less competitive.
We have a situation here which certainly calls for a more focused effort to reform our international institutions. I would say with respect to the IMF and the World Bank that in many respects now they are part of the problem rather than the solution. They make countries do things that countries should not have to do. Through structural adjustment and things like that they literally make countries, particularly the poorer countries, starve their own people in order to pay off debts either to the IMF directly or to banks or generally to their creditors. There is something desperately wrong about this.
It is why we have seen recently the call by the leadership of the churches in Canada for something that is called Jubilee 2000, which is an attempt to use the spirit of the jubilee proclaimed in Deuteronomy; that is to say, the idea that every 50 years the debt should be wiped clean and people should get a chance to—