Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Red Deer.
It is a pleasure to rise and address the Speech from the Throne today. I want to address it first of all from the perspective of being a member from the riding of Medicine Hat in Alberta. In a moment I will talk about how it affects the portfolio which I critique, namely human resources development.
The first thing I would say in reflecting on the throne speech is that it seemed to put forward a number of ideas that we already have heard about many times in the past. We have heard the government talk endlessly in past throne speeches about the need to deal with child poverty. That is fine. We agree with that, but it seems like every time there is a throne speech the government comes up with some new proposal to address the problem but it never gets fixed.
The same is true of issues affecting aboriginals. We see new program after new program. Again there are new programs here but the problem never seems to get better. Oftentimes it seems to get worse. That should cause us to reflect a little about whether or not these programs are a good idea or maybe we need to come up with some completely new approaches.
We see the government addressing the issue of Kyoto in the throne speech. In my judgment that is completely out of step with where Canadians are at. Canadians want clean air and they want to deal with pollutants in the air. They want to get rid of smog. If the public understood all the implications of Kyoto they would not be supportive of it.
One of the things that struck me when I read the passage about Kyoto in the throne speech was the fact that the government said on the one hand that it would be ratified by Christmas, but on the other hand said that it was consulting right now. How can it decide that it will ratify the thing if it has not even finished consulting yet? It is an insult to the intelligence of Canadians to suggest that it is taking their input seriously if it already decided to go ahead and ratify the thing.
The government is planning on ratifying it without any plan to implement it. How will this work? There is nothing worse than uncertainty. We have individuals and businesses with billions of dollars ready to invest but they have no idea how Kyoto would be implemented. Obviously it will put a chill on investment and those people will withhold those investments until it is clear what is going on.
It is important that the government provide the public with some sense of what the impact of Kyoto would be. How can we have a meaningful debate if we do not know what the impact would be?
Members should consider for a moment what might happen to seniors under Kyoto. If energy prices go up even a little, and they are likely to go up a lot more than a little, what would be the impact on utility costs? Members should remember that the great majority of seniors are on fixed incomes. It is tight for them already. Utility costs are climbing. If Kyoto comes in, what would be the impact on seniors? Those are the sorts of questions that need to be addressed before we go marching forward to ratify the thing. Unfortunately the government seems determined to do exactly that.
Also notable are the things that were not in the throne speech. I spent a week this summer at CFB Wainwright through the Department of National Defence parliamentary outreach. We spent time out in the field and slept on the ground in a tent. I got a good sense of what it is like for the infantry of the Canadian military. It was a fascinating experience. I have tremendous respect for our troops. They are tough, disciplined, and extraordinarily professional, but they do not have the resources.
When we went out there we did live fire exercises and all kinds of things, but in many cases they did not even have enough ammunition to conduct live fire exercises. That is a real concern, especially when we consider what they are being asked to do: engage in peacekeeping roles, go to Afghanistan and perhaps now even go to Iraq. They need those resources but there was no commitment in the throne speech to granting any more resources. That is a disgrace.
The throne speech talked about the issue of health care, which is something that is very important to Canadians. It said that somewhere down the road the Liberals would think about reforming it, but the immediate cash injection needed was not there. Again, the government has different priorities.
When it comes to agriculture, there is one sentence in the throne speech on it. I think it is generally accepted by the Canadian public that agriculture is in deep trouble right now. The government has provided no overarching plan to help us deal with the economic travails of the farmers and ranchers, and there are many, due to subsidies, drought and the fact that the government has put in place institutions that do not allow, for instance, farmers to market their own wheat and barley.
Finally, there is a problem in not addressing the issue of the economy. The world economy today is in desperate straits. The Canadian economy is doing okay but it cannot forever resist the pull and tug of the world economy. Right now the United States is in a difficult situation. There are some people who talk about the world going through a deflationary period and we need to be concerned about that. Unfortunately it is not addressed in the throne speech.
Let me talk a moment about my critic area, human resources development. There were a couple of mentions in the speech about things that the government would do such as scrap the youth employment strategy, which has the spritely acronym of YES. I guess we could say the government is now saying no to YES. The problem with dealing with that approach to dealing with social problems is the government is putting all the emphasis on the part that really only addresses the concerns of a small percentage of people. What I mean by that is, if the economy is really roaring, that will deal with about 90% of the concerns of ordinary Canadians. It provides a good income, a job, money that can go into an RSP, university and RRSPs for retirement.
Unfortunately the government has put no emphasis on the component of addressing Canada's social problems. Even today, when we have a relatively buoyant economy in a province like Newfoundland, we have unemployment rates of 16%. We need to remember that Newfoundland is one of the provinces that is leading the country in growth. However because of the structure of some of the social programs, including employment insurance, we have created disincentives to labour market attachment or staying employed in the workforce. The government is actually working against some of its goals with some of its social programs. We are very critical of that.
I know I do not have a tremendous amount of time so I will start to wrap it up. While we appreciate that the Prime Minister wants to leave a legacy as he prepares to depart this place after 40 years, we do not feel it should be done on the backs of taxpayers. We do not feel that the Prime Minister really enhances his image by running up a tremendous amount of spending on a bunch of social programs that have been tried for 20 or 30 years and still have not dealt with the issues that they were designed to address.
We think a much better approach would be to address his concerns to the concerns of Canadians. Health care, the military, national security and agriculture are some of the issues my friends over here have mentioned. These things need to be addressed. Unfortunately, they are not being addressed by the Prime Minister in the throne speech.
The result of that is, as we go into a very turbulent future in many respects in terms of the economy and where the world is going with respect to Iraq and the war on terrorism, we do not have a clear path ahead of us. The government has missed a glorious opportunity to put some focus on where the government will go to help us address some of those issues. However it missed that opportunity. Instead we received from the Prime Minister and the government a recycled throne speech, and I regret that very much.
Therefore, it is safe to say that our party simply cannot support either the drift or the specifics of this throne speech.