Mr. Speaker, as a member of parliament from Winnipeg, Manitoba, I too would like to take this opportunity to add my support for Bill S-25. I am very pleased to hear of the level of co-operation and good will from all parties in the speeches we heard to date.
I will briefly point out that my riding of Winnipeg Centre is home to quite a large Mennonite population. It has been my very good fortune to get to know many of the activists in the Mennonite faith in my neighbourhood and in the area.
I will add some comments on how impressed I have been with the level of commitment Mennonite people in my riding have shown to issues such as building a sense of community, social justice, goodwill on a number of levels and certainly a sense of personal sacrifice. The Mennonite people feel very strongly that their faith in their day to day lives must be integrated to the point where I believe the social gospel really is the overwhelming motivating influence.
If Bill S-25, as has been said, would enable Mennonites to restructure their administrative side so they could be more effective in the work that they do, then it is incumbent upon us to support it without any hesitation.
One of the things that I have been most impressed about is meeting anti-war activists, pacifists in the truest sense of the Mennonite faith. As recently as this month, I received a number of letters at my offices from people of the Mennonite faith pointing out that they did not choose to pay income tax that would be put toward military development. They did the mathematics which showed that if 6% or 7% of the total budget goes to the military, they would withhold that amount of money from their income tax. They would not give it to the government to spend on those things.
It is a longstanding gesture in the pacifist anti-war movement and I have nothing but admiration for those who make that comment with their spending power, with their taxation dollars. I believe it becomes an administrative nuisance, certainly for Revenue Canada, but it is the type of peaceful demonstration that very clearly puts their point of view front and centre.
To speak briefly on the work that they do in my immediate area, I have said many times that the riding of Winnipeg Centre is an area of great need, it being the core area of Winnipeg. The Mennonite activists, to their credit, have actually targeted this part of my city to move into deliberately in order to try to elevate the standard of the neighbourhoods in that area.
There are middle class people, be they teachers, nurses or whatever, who could afford to live out in the suburbs where it might be safer and more pleasant and where there would be more access to services, but they consciously choose as a group, en masse, to move into an area of the greatest need and therefore bring the stability of their two parent families and well educated children with them to elevate the overall standard of the neighbourhood. That in itself is a level of civic duty that we do not really see. When people go beyond making a donation to a charitable organization, when they actually alter their own personal lives to do what is right for their home community, I think there is nothing more admirable.
Others have pointed out that they have personal contact with the Mennonite faith. My family as well has integrated with the Mennonite community in that I have cousins, uncles and aunts in the Schroeder family from the Portage area. Even though I was raised as a Catholic, not as a Mennonite, I did gain a great deal of personal knowledge about the Mennonite faith by virtue of our shared family issues.
The other thing I would like to point out is the development work that they have done in the Mennonite communities of Winkler, Altona and Morden in Manitoba. This part of Manitoba is actually the most stable and prosperous part of the province now, due in no small part to the entrepreneurial skills and industrialization of the area brought about by the Mennonite people. It was otherwise just an agricultural community. They started small businesses and small manufacturing such as the wood manufacturing industry in Manitoba. The largest single private sector company in Manitoba is Palliser Furniture, which is the largest wood products manufacturer in all of Canada.
I just wanted to take this opportunity as a member of parliament from Manitoba and from Winnipeg to add my enthusiastic support for the bill. If it helps the Mennonite community in the structuring of the good work it does, we should certainly be foursquare in their corner on this.
One of the other services the Mennonite community has brought to us in the province of Manitoba is the mediation and conciliation service they offer through their church. Whenever there is an issue like two neighbours arguing over a fence, they have the option of taking it to the mediation service offered by the Mennonite church rather than going to litigation. It has been and continues to be of very great value.
I am very proud to be part of this. Bill S-25 is one of those things that we should be able to do as a cleanup at the end of parliament, with multiparty support and easy passage.