Mr. Speaker, as I said in the first five minutes of my reply to the Speech from the Throne, if the Prime Minister wants to have a true legacy he has 16 months in order to act for the public good and to implement changes for the public good that will dramatically improve the lives of Canadians. I have spoken before on health care with regard to amending and modernizing the Canada Health Act, implementing a plan for a manpower strategy for nurses, doctors and technicians and also a plan I proferred the last time I spoke which would enable those people to be redistributed to rural areas to work.
On the issue of economics, if the Prime Minister truly wants to affect the poor the objective is not to throw money at the situation but to give them the tools to do the job. Certainly there are many individuals who cannot work for various reasons and those people need to be taken care of. That is the purpose of social programs. What we need to do is give people the tools so they are able to work and provide for themselves.
One thing the Prime Minister could do is raise the basic minimum people have to pay taxes on to $18,000 a year. No one in the country who is making less than $18,000 a year should be paying any tax. A person can barely survive on that.
On the issue of drugs in health care, what the Prime Minister ought to do is implement a strategy that works to prevent drug use and criminal use and also gets tough with those parasites in our society, particularly organized crime gangs, who are involved in drug trafficking, prostitution and money laundering. They are preying upon our society, using our weak laws that enable them to do it.
On the issue of foreign policy, the Prime Minister said he wants to have an African agenda. He has said some very nice words but has not backed them up with facts. He has not acted on Zimbabwe. He has not mentioned a word on the crisis in Zimbabwe, where half the population of that country, six million people, is going to die in the next six months unless the international community mobilizes against President Mugabe. Although this is not about land reform at all, President Mugabe is using the land reform issue and racial politics as a shield to hide his true objective, which is to brutalize the black population. Ninety-nine and a half per cent of the people in Zimbabwe are black and he is going to kill six million of them by depriving them of food in a politically engineered famine over the next six months. This is not on anyone's radar screen.
Another seven million are going to die in politically engineered famines in five other countries. In Angola we have a narrow window of opportunity to help that country in a multilateral effort to engage with President dos Santos and use the billions of dollars in oil money for health and education, de-mining and infrastructure. This would go a long way toward saving that country. If we do not engage in Angola in the next six months as an international community, that country will become a failed state like Somalia. The country will fracture and we will never, ever be able to pick that up again.
On the issue of AIDS, 30% and sometimes up to 50% of the population in some countries is HIV positive. This is going to wipe out half the population of some countries. The economic backbone of these countries will wither away. The Prime Minister feels that the answer is to throw money at the situation. The irony of the continent is that it is an extraordinarily rich continent. It has incredible resources in diamonds, minerals, coltan, hydro power, agriculture and timber. It has incredible resources and yet it has the poorest people on the planet.
Throwing money at the situation is not the same as having an effect. What we need to do is implement policies that are going to affect people and deal with the three major issues that are affecting the development of that continent: corruption and lack of governance; conflict; and a lack of capacitance in primary health and education, as well as of course AIDS. Affect those three, work with the resources on the continent, enable capacitance to take place, defeat corruption and have good governance, and our country would have a foreign policy that truly would be an African agenda which the Prime Minister could be proud of and would affect the lives of these people.