Mr. Speaker, I feel privileged to have an opportunity to speak in the debate.
I want to go back to an evening I had 14 months ago. A group of us were in Toronto sitting around and listening to the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, talk about his life as president. He decided at the end of the evening that he would take questions. A young man in the back of the room stood and asked, “Mr. Clinton, if you had an opportunity to be the president again, what would the number one issue be on your agenda?” Mr. Clinton said, “There is only one issue. It is climate change and, as a North American society, we have to mobilize and get involved in doing what is right for future generations”.
When the Prime Minister announced that we as a House of Commons would be voting for the ratification of Kyoto, it will go down as one of his boldest moves as a leader. I will tell members why the Prime Minister has the confidence that he is doing the right thing.
I happened to be around here in 1983 as a young assistant when we had inflation of 13% and unemployment of 12%. It was a very scary time to be in government. At that particular moment in time, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stood in the House and announced a wage and price restraint program only for the Government of Canada. Over a two year period we were going to lead by example in restraining wages and prices. He appealed to Canadians to join in the exercise on a voluntary basis for the good of the entire country. I remember vividly the opposition at that time saying that this would never happen, that it was just a public relations gimmick. That is what the opposition said.
The people of Canada rallied. Small business, large business and unions from coast to coast involved themselves in the great mobilization of the national will of the country. Within a two and a half year period we reversed the trajectory of wages and prices spiralling out of control, which were causing enormous damage to the economy. It was the public will. It was not through regulation. It was the ingenuity of individual men and women who got involved in this national exercise.
I believe that same quality and capacity of ingenuity exists today. We do not have to have the plan in a definitive way today for what we will be doing for the next 10 years. We never had a perfect plan when we gave the Government of Canada support for Spar Aerospace in 1980 to make a space arm, but through research and ingenuity, two and a half years later we had one of the most proud moments in Canadian technology when that space arm opened in outer space.