Mr. Speaker, Bill C-18 is certainly an interesting debate. I guess it brings out the best and the worst in us. Some members in some parts of the country forget that Canada is a very generous country. Canada, as we well know regardless of our politics, has been defined by the United Nations as the best country in the world.
One of the reasons for that is equalization. It is an accepted reality in the country that not all the provinces are equal in terms of resources and richness. The government and the governments that preceded it, going back to the early sixties, recognized that and have been very generous over the years.
We can argue on points of generosity and whether or not the present formula works. However, if we were living in a perfect world and Canada was absolutely perfect, we would not need equalization. Unfortunately Atlantic Canada and some of the western provinces are not blessed with oil in the ground at $40 a barrel. That is a reality. Who do we blame for that, the Prime Minister or the Almighty? It is beyond the Prime Minister's capacity to put oil in the ground in every province, although I guess if we want to be entirely political we could attack him on that as well.
I wish to point out, and I hope that my colleagues from Alberta are listening, that from 1957 to 1965 Alberta received equalization from Ottawa. What does that tell us?
It tells us that it was not always rich and that it was not always prosperous. The energy there in its early years was just as Nova Scotia's is now, in its infancy. The major difference was that at the time Alberta received 100 cents of every royalty dollar that came in. For every dollar that it took out of the ground in oil, it kept it.
What we are arguing in Atlantic Canada, and especially our friends from Nova Scotia who are now blessed with natural gas, is that it should have the same formula applied to it as was the case in Alberta.
If logic prevails, and it does in this argument, and if we want to raise ourselves to a level of sustainability in terms of the economy and diversifying the economy, we need the tools to do that. The biggest tool of all is a financial tool, the financial resources to build a strong economy as Ralph Klein has done in Alberta and Premier Lougheed before him. It is building on the principle that what is ours is ours and we will use it to benefit the people of our province. That is what we are talking about in New Brunswick. The formula has to be revisited. Mr. Speaker, with your permission I will revisit—