Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to rise in this debate and to recognize all parties for agreeing to this special format. It will lend itself well to a good discussion about a subject that is very close to my heart and I am sure to members who are gathered in the House. That is the sustainability of our natural resource economies which in essence is the sustainability of rural Canada.
When we take a look at rural Canada, it is not hard to realize that for the most part we are dependent on our natural resource industries for our economic well-being, for the wealth of our citizens and for the quality of life of those who live in rural areas. Whether it is depending on the agricultural industry or on the fisheries or on mining or forestry, in rural Canada we are very much dependent on our natural resource industries.
If we think about it, our natural resource industries account for more than 15% of our gross domestic product and close to 14% of the jobs in Canada are based on our primary industries. A large part of our trade surplus that we enjoy as a nation is as a result of our ability to harvest our natural resources.
This government, since it came to office in 1993, has a long and I think a very positive history of understanding and dealing with the natural resource sector.
I recall in the previous parliament the Speech from the Throne in 1996 speaking directly for the first time in many years to the needs of rural Canada, to the need to sustain our natural resource industries and to the need to sustain the rural communities that depend on those natural resource industries.
Leading out of those commitments that were made in the Speech from the Throne in 1996, I had the honour and the privilege of chairing the natural resource committee in 1997 when we travelled around the country and talked with rural Canadians and produced something called “The Think Rural Report”. I see the hon. member for Athabasca who was a member of that committee and who worked with me and I see others who were on that committee at the time to produce that report. I should also mention that the report was a unanimous report. All parties in the House that day agreed to the recommendations that we made in there about sustaining rural Canada, sustaining our natural resource industries and ensuring that they remained an integral part of our economy.
I was pleased that leading out of that report the government of 1998 brought forward the Canadian rural partnership, an initiative by which we were able to deal with the issues of rural Canada and the issues of our natural resource industries.
I was further pleased when in 1999 the Prime Minister created a separate position for rural Canada, a position which I occupy right now, secretary of state for rural Canada, to ensure that the issues that surround rural Canadians and surround our natural resource industries would be front and centre of the discussions and the debates that took place here in parliament.
I was also pleased to see in the budget last February some very specific commitments to rural Canada and some very specific commitments to sustaining our natural resource industries.
One of the most important things, and I hope we have a chance to talk about this in debate today, is the need for us as parliamentarians, for the government and for Canadians in general to understand that the challenges that rural Canadians face and that our natural resource communities face are unique. They are different from those that are often faced by an urban community from the urban parts of the country. We need to approach, from a public policy perspective, what we do in a way that recognizes and understands those unique challenges that we face in rural Canada and in our natural resource communities.
If we think about it for a second, we can clearly see those challenges. First, there is the challenge of geography. When someone comes from rural Canada there is a whole lot of geography. One of the issues concerns how we deliver services. How do we provide either public or private services over vast geographic areas? It is very different from how we may approach it in a very tightly populated urban centre.
We also have the issue of population density. When we are trying to attract investment to rural Canada and to communities that are dependent on the natural resource industries, we often do not have the density of population nor the market size where we can readily attract the private sector to make the same type of investments they may be willing to do all on their own in an urban area. We need to approach things differently where we often need to have public-private partnerships in order for that type of investment to occur in rural communities. Infrastructure is a good example of that.
Telecommunications infrastructure may happen all by itself in a large urban centre because the population density and the market size are there. That same infrastructure, just as essential in rural areas, will not happen through the private sector because the market size is not there. We need those types of partnerships, public and private.
Another issue is the distance from market. If people are dealing in rural Canada or in the natural resource industries, they have the unique challenge of distance from market. If one is a small entrepreneur or small business person trying to set up, that is a challenge that he or she may have to face in rural Canada but not one in urban Canada.
One of the most important differences and one that I am sure the members in the House know and the viewers from rural Canada understand is that our economies that are natural resource based tend to be cyclical in nature. They are very much based on commodity prices and commodity prices fluctuate. That means that we very often have a different type of economy than what we may find in a diversified manufacturing based or technologically based urban economy.
What that means is that we need to take a different public policy approach when we are dealing with rural natural resource based economies than we may take when we are dealing with the manufacturing diversified technologically based urban economy.
One of the successes of the government, and we could have a debate about the degree of that success I suspect, is that we have an understanding that there are in fact unique challenges that face rural communities and that we need to approach our economies in rural areas differently to reflect those challenges.
The approach itself has to be important. From my perspective, there are four major approaches that are appropriate. One of those approaches we call the rural lens.
The rural lens, which is one of my responsibilities as the Secretary of State for Rural Development, ensures that when we consider policy, when we consider legislation and when we consider responding to the issues of the day, we make sure that we do it in a way that makes sense for rural Canadians as much as it makes sense for urban Canadians, so that the solution does not just make sense in the big cities of Canada but that it makes sense in the small communities and the rural areas. The rural lens puts the responses that we are making, whether they be legislative or regulatory, through a lens to ensure that they make as much sense on Main Street, rural Canada as they do on Main Street, urban Canada.
Second, I believe that as we deal with the issues of rural Canada and the issues of natural resource based economies, that we must take a bottom up and not a top down approach. We must allow communities themselves to determine the best way to achieve their economic sustainability. It would reflect that the needs of the fishing community in Newfoundland are very different from a mining community in northern Ontario, an agricultural community on the prairies or a forestry community in British Columbia. Although they all face those unique challenges I talked about before, their solutions to those challenges will be and need to be reflective of their particular needs. That is why it is important that we have a bottom up approach where we empower communities to set their strategies and to move forward.
The role of the senior levels of government, whether that be provincial or federal, is to provide those communities with a set of tools that allows them to pursue their objectives in a way that makes sense for them. That is why we have such tools as the regional development agencies, in my particular case, in northern Ontario, FEDNOR. The reason we have the community futures program, where we saw a $90 million investment, and an infrastructure program that has a specific amount targeted for rural areas, is so we can help provide the tools to these communities as they pursue those plans.
Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Hastings—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington. Given the formality of the debate tonight, I look perhaps to engaging a little later with my colleagues.