Madam Speaker, I would like to make a few comments about the Speech from the Throne as is my want sometimes in this place. I think there are at least three major areas of failure at the moment on the part of the government which I want to concentrate. There are probably a lot when I get to thinking about it. However I want to talk about health care briefly, Kyoto and also about democracy and the failure of the throne speech to address in any meaningful way the democratic deficit that the member for LaSalle—Émard has just discovered upon his becoming a backbencher.
The first area is medicare. What the government did not do in the Speech from the Throne was to commit to restoring the federal government to the position of being a full federal partner in the federal-provincial partnership that medicare was at the beginning and is no longer, thanks to the progressive unilateral withdrawal of the federal government from the funding of medicare.
I have seen this happen over the 23 years that I have been here, the unilateral reductions in federal transfer payments to the provinces for medicare starting with the Liberal government and the budget of Allan MacEachen in 1981 or 1982 and then by Conservatives and Jake Epp when he was the minister of health. After 1984 there were Tory unilateral reductions and then more Liberal unilateral reductions and finally of course there was the disaster of the budget of 1995 in which the current member for LaSalle—Émard basically gutted the federal contribution to medicare and set the conditions for the crisis in medicare that we now observe, which is that on the Liberal watch the privatizers have been given their opportunity.
Therefore what was needed here was not a commitment to have a first ministers meeting after the Romanow report, although there is nothing wrong with having a first ministers meeting on health care. That would be a good idea. However what was needed here was a commitment on the part of the federal government that it would become full federal partners once again and move toward, if it cannot move immediately to, full fifty-fifty cost sharing of health care which is the cost sharing basis on which medicare came into being. That would constitute the federal government having both the moral high ground and the fiscal high ground and they come together. We do not get the moral high ground without having the fiscal high ground. This is something that the federal government has not been willing to acknowledge. It is only when the Liberals are willing to put the money back into health care that they took out fully, plus, because even if they went back to 1993 levels it would not be fifty-fifty cost sharing, and when they can say to the provinces, “This is the kind of national health care system we want and this is the kind of health care system that we demand of you”. That is what the government has failed to do in the throne speech.
I will very quickly speak about Kyoto, because my colleague from Windsor—St. Clair has dealt with this quite adequately. What I think the government is failing to do is to show some enthusiasm for the accord. It kind of reminds me the way it defended the Nisga'a treaty. It was only when it had to. It let other people defend it and then defended it when it got to the floor of the House of Commons, as it probably will when we have a motion with respect to ratification. Maybe even the Minister of Health will have a positive word to say about it. We will wait and see.
This should be viewed as an opportunity, not as some kind of horrible necessity that the government had to be dragged into. The idea of creating a new economy, built around energy saving technologies, built around renewable energy, built around creating really a new way of life, getting more freight back on the rails and off the highways and creating new modes of public transportation should be seen as something about which to be excited. The idea of creating a way of life in which we do not constantly travel about with the knowledge that we may be contributing to the ultimate destruction of the planet should be something to be excited about and the government should be out there making the case much more strongly. We should not have to be criticizing the government on this. We should just have to be supporting it. We would like to support it, but it should show a little gumption, show a little enthusiasm for the task. This is not being done.
Finally, with respect to the democratic deficit, this is very interesting. I love to watch the member for LaSalle—Émard discover that there is a democratic deficit after having presided as the minister of finance over one of the most undemocratic regimes, parliamentarily speaking of course. Presumably many people on the Liberal backbench felt that there was a democratic deficit. If they feel that there is one now, surely it existed prior to the resignation, or the firing depending on how we look at it, of the minister of finance.
What do we have in the throne speech? There is some hint that we may get some changes with respect to campaign finance and how we finance electoral parties. That is probably directed at the member for LaSalle—Émard himself, for all we know, if the ongoing intrigue within the Liberal Party is any indication.
What we do not have is any tip of the hat or any acknowledgment that there is something profoundly wrong with our electoral system. Canadians want a system in which their vote counts no matter where they cast it and in which their vote contributes in some way to the ultimate makeup of their Parliament, no matter what region they are in and no matter for what party they vote. Of course I am talking about some kind of proportional representation.
At the very least the government could have said, “Why do we not have an all party task force on this? Why do we not have an all party task force that goes about the country and hears from Canadians on what they would like to see in terms of electoral reform?” Maybe it does not want proportional representation but it would at least be an opportunity for those who think it would be a good idea and for those who think that there may be other ways of improving our electoral system to come forward. Regrettably, that is not so.
There was a very good article today in the Globe and Mail by Hugh Segal and Ed Broadbent on this very topic, on what was absent from the government's democratic reform package, although I am being far too kind to call it a package. There really was hardly anything there at all.
There was no mention, for instance, in terms of the democratic deficit of chapter 11 in the paragraph or two about Canada and the world. There was no mention of the trade agreements or any need to improve them. Chapter 11, as the House knows, is the investor's stake dispute settlement mechanism which enables corporations to sue governments if, when acting in the public interest, they get in the way of the profit strategies of certain corporations.
This is a democratic issue. The real democratic deficit is in the trade agreement whereby the ability of democratically elected governments to protect the public interest or act in the common good is restricted by these agreements.
This is not unrelated to what is going on in health care at the moment. The Romanow Commission had a study commissioned which reported that if under NAFTA we permitted these private hospitals to proliferate, as they are now on the Liberal watch which refuses to do anything, and at some point a provincial government did not want to have private hospitals any more and acted to eliminate them, if they were owned by Americans who were making money from those hospitals, the province could not do so without being subjected to the terms and conditions of chapter 11.
Everything is connected to everything else. If the government really wanted to address the democratic deficit, this is one of the things it would have at least mentioned in the throne speech.
Finally, on democratic deficit, we had a unanimous recommendation of the justice committee for the second time in the last several years that the government bring forward corporate criminal liability legislation to deal with the kind of thing that happened at Westray. It was a unanimous recommendation. Where are the Liberal backbenchers? Why are they not up on their hind legs asking that the government respect a unanimous recommendation of a standing committee of this House? Why was there no mention in the throne speech of that?
That should have been one promise that was in the throne speech that grew right out of a recommendation of a committee of the House of Commons. It was not there. Anybody who wants to talk about democratic deficit on the other side should be up saying: “Why is it that the government did not respect the unanimous recommendation of a standing committee of this House?”
Where are the Liberal voices on this one?