As my friend from Vancouver East has said, it is a nightmare that ordinary people are facing.
Let us get our priorities straight. The country needs a vision by a strong federal government, a national vision that includes all Canadians, including rural Canadians. We need a strong federal government that will take on the Americans in terms of their trade policy. We need a strong national government with a national farm support program to make sure that farmers get back their costs of production as a minimum plus a decent income on which to live. That is the kind of vision we need.
We need a federal government that is committed to use some of the national surplus to help the farmers and rural people. Yet the federal government was so spooked before the last election campaign by the Alliance and by the brand new leader of the Alliance Party that it made a commitment to the biggest tax cut in the history of our country, some $100 billion over five years, at the cost of cutbacks to the farmers, at the cost of cutbacks to our national health care system, and at the cost of cutbacks to transfers to the provinces for public education.
Where is the Liberal Party of old? Where is the Liberal Party of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau? Where has that party gone? Sitting across the way is the most conservative government in the last 40 years.
As I said before, program spending now by the government is the lowest it has been since 1949, when comparing program spending to the GDP. That is not the Liberal Party of old which would pick up ideas from the CCF and the NDP, such as national medicare, social programs, a mixed economy, the CBC, the Canadian Wheat Board. Where is that old Liberal Party? The old Liberal Party is gone.
Hopefully some Liberals will get up in the House of Commons today and give us a national vision of where we should be going. If we do not do that we will lose rural Canada and the farmers.
I see another friend of mine across the way from New Brunswick. I hope he also gets up in the House. He represents a rural riding and talks about the devastation of the economy in rural New Brunswick and what has happened there since the Liberal Party has come to power.