Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. As he said himself, this question does not deal directly with the motion being debated today. That said, I will nonetheless take a few moments to answer it because I think this is a very important question.
I understand that what my colleague is saying is based on a sense of generosity, compassion, and of course a desire for uniformity and a desire to avoid the downside that comes with a plan of this breadth. I sense that he too is driven by generosity and compassion. It is this same generosity and compassion that I want to invoke in order to encourage this House, if possible, to support a motion such as the one put forward by our colleague from Winnipeg Centre.
Naturally we should be concerned about the daily lives of our fellow citizens in Quebec and in Canada. Yet, we must also realize that in a world of globalization we are increasingly less foreign to citizens of Gabon, the Central African Republic, or Argentina.
We also have to be concerned about their well-being since, as I am so fond of pointing out, one job in four in Canada depends directly on foreign trade. It is therefore important for us to worry about the well-being of people outside of Canada because sooner or later they might be consumers of products we make.
We have to be concerned about this, especially since, as we have seen in Quebec, the tendency is to think that giving companies more freedom will improve matters. We have to realize that someone earning $7 an hour pays less income tax than someone earning $11. Consequently, the state is unable to intervene effectively to ensure the best redistribution of wealth and the betterment of its citizens.