Mr. Speaker, the member opposite made, I certainly agree, some very important points about the debt, but I cannot help but intervene on his comments about referenda.
I know he has a lot of faith in what the Americans are doing by holding referenda, but I would like to point out to him that the cost of popular justice, of popular referenda if you will, in the United States has involved basically the wild west, the lawlessness of the wild west and the genocide of the Indians.
It involved Jim Crow laws in the southern United States, where the popular municipalities with the Ku Klux Klan led to all kinds of atrocities against people based on race. Because of popular justice it was entirely impossible at that particular time, at the turn of the century, to bring these people to justice when they did these things against people because of race.
Jim Crow laws are again another reflection of popular sentiment translated into prejudice against individuals, whereas I remind the member opposite that the Canadian experience in these areas was entirely different. We did not have a wild west, and we did not have a wild west because decision making was not vested in people at the grassroots. It was vested in laws that were determined by members of parliament rather than referenda. When people are elected, those people should be speaking from their own conscience and not simply as a result of popular pressure. That is the danger of referenda, as we see in the United States.
The member is perfectly correct. The Americans love referenda. But it could also come back to the same kind of prejudice, hate and destruction that typified the kind of referenda we saw in the 19th century and at the turn of the century against both Indians and blacks.