Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the amendments as well as to the essence of Bill C-11, an act to authorize the divestiture of the assets of the Cape Breton Development Corporation. I am honoured to follow the two Cape Breton members of parliament who spoke so passionately to the issue. I would like to try to follow in their footsteps.
With this bill the government will be carrying out its intention to privatize Devco. As we know, the government has a passion for privatization. It has an obsession for cutting loose some of the jewels in our crown, the actual treasures that we hold dear in this country. It believes that Devco should be cut loose and in fact that Atlantic Canada should be cut loose.
We have seen this over and over from the government. We have seen our health care system cut loose. We have seen the government's commitment move from a 50% commitment to national medicare down to a 13% commitment. We have seen our railways cut loose. Now we have seen the CBC cut loose. We have seen over $400 million removed from the CBC, our national broadcasting corporation. We have seen 3,800 jobs disappear. It is all with the assumption that somehow the private sector will take up the slack, and we know it will not.
With Devco the argument is the same, that the private sector will somehow do a better job. This is a sort of ubiquitous mantra of the government. I almost think government members repeat it on their treadmills when they are exercising or when they are going to sleep at night. They may mutter cuts are the best policy; private sector good, public sector bad; corporations are always right. Of course there is the continuing mantra that Cape Breton is a financial money pit.
It is interesting that not only is this last mantra a false one. It is also one that has been taken up by the official opposition, the Reform Party. I guess the Reform Party has finally become an Ottawa insider, adopting the bureaucratic mantras in the same way as the frontbench opposite. I want to bring some of those fallacies to the attention of the House.
It is important for everyone to note that Cape Breton has been producing coal for 300 years, long before Ottawa bureaucrats existed to criticize the enterprise. The coal produced in Cape Breton fired the steamers which helped build the British Empire. They were critical components of industrial expansion in the early days of Canada.
The contribution which Cape Breton coal made to our war efforts in both wars cannot be underestimated. At the end of the second world war 17,000 Cape Breton workers kept the coal moving. Like many other industries after the war, there were to be big changes in coal production, and there were.
The mines declined substantially and by 1965 they were ready for closure, which would have thrown 6,500 miners out of work. However the more progressive government of the day than the one that introduced Bill C-11 understood that allowing the collapse of the coal industry was against the public interest for two reasons.
The Pearson government understood that there was a viable economic need for coal production in Cape Breton to continue. It is almost eerie how the setting up of Devco seemed to have foretold the oil crisis of the seventies. Until Devco, power in Nova Scotia was produced by oil generating stations. If these stations had not changed to coal fired stations in the late sixties, the impact of the OPEC crisis would have decimated the Nova Scotia economy.
I heard both Liberals and Reformers whine about the money pit of Cape Breton requiring this drastic legislation. However I never hear them talk about the billions saved by businesses and residents of Atlantic Canada because of cheap Cape Breton coal being used to create electricity.
The mantra continues: Cape Breton's Devco should be cut loose; the private sector will do a better job; and the government will continue to offer call centre jobs to this beautiful island. I say shame on the government's minimum wage commitments to Cape Breton and its people.
Today I learned that the reprieve of local news shows at the CBC, which is another sock from the Liberals to maritimers and which I have already called a sham to get the government through the next election, is not what the government had taken credit for. The national programs will get millions to produce a slick commercial free 30 minutes of national news. They will get time to develop the ideas and will get the resources to do it right, an approach which local shows have always done well. Due to the Liberal broken promises, the local shows have scant days to come up with the millions in cuts.