Mr. Speaker, this topic concerns me. I should like to address what I think is a deficiency in the bill, the 18% ownership by the Government of Canada of Petro-Canada.
I come from Saskatchewan. I should like to draw on the history of that province in dealing with this topic. In 1944 we elected a Baptist minister as the premier of that province who embarked on a different way of doing things. There was a lot of state intervention, state ownership and state control of the economy.
At the very same time in our sister province to the west we elected a Baptist minister who believed in self-reliance and the market system. At that time Saskatchewan had approximately one and a quarter million people. Saskatoon and Regina were far larger centres than Edmonton and Calgary. Alberta had approximately 600,000 people. At the end of the last century we now see which model has worked.
Saskatchewan has a million people. Many of the members sitting on this side of the House from Alberta are transplanted Saskatchewan people. Even some of the Ontario people are transplanted Saskatchewan people. We have been great at exporting people from our province. Alberta has three million people today.
This 18% ownership is a reminder of a flawed, failed policy in the seventies where the federal government decided to use the Saskatchewan model to embark in the economy in a major way. It cost the Canadian economy a lot of money. It created a lot of unity problems that are still lasting in the country.
I wish the Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs were here today so we could deal with some of the grievances out west which he says do not exist.
I think the 20th century was a contest among many things. One of the big contests was a contest between a free market driven economy and state controlled command style economies. The verdict came in loud and clear—