Mr. Speaker, I, too, am very pleased to speak to Bill C-465. I did take the time to re-read the speech by the member for Northumberland—Quinte West on June 1, 2010. I must agree that it is one of the best speeches that I have read in the House.
He made reference to the fact that several other provinces have special days. The provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario have existing legislation and, as he indicated, Saskatchewan is in the process of doing it. Manitoba's day seems like a number of months ago, maybe it was not that long ago, but I was certainly invited to participate in it. It, coincidentally, was just days after the vote on the long gun registry. So I was pleased to be very welcomed at that event.
I have talked to the member in the past and he agreed that the state of tourism was not what it should be in a cross-border sense. He said that perhaps passing his bill, which will surely become law, will actually aid the tourism industry in this country. I share with him the concerns about that, because we have all been hearing from owners of tourist facilities and tourist camps about how business has dropped. One business in northwestern Ontario that has been in the family for three generations, is, I believe, in danger of closing right now because the number of tourists has dropped off. Part of that has to do with the strong dollar. We have not seen such a strong dollar since Diefenbaker's days and that comes with many challenges.
However, there are other areas in which the government and the member could us and help the tourism industry. I have at least two on which I would like to ask for his support tonight. One of them has to do with the cost of passports. We have the ability in the House to pass an all-party motion. However, this past summer, we were lucky enough at the Midwestern Legislative Conference, which is an annual conference that has been held for quite a number of decades now, consisting of 11 midwest states, starting with Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin, and three Canadian provinces, which would include Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan. The members should know that it is very difficult to get any sort of resolution through this body, because we are talking about 500 politicians, Democrats and Republicans, who can fight about almost anything, and Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats from Canada who also can fight about almost anything if given a chance.
Do members know what we did at that conference? We decided to bring a resolution sponsored by Senator O'Connell from the state of North Dakota into the U.S.-Canada committee. The committee spent most of its time, its two or three hour meetings, discussing this one resolution out of the 15 that it had to deal with, and everybody on that committee was supportive of it. As a matter of fact, it was seconded by a Liberal MPP from Ontario and it made it through the committee with almost everybody wanting to speak in favour of it, and an American legislator telling the committee how he had to pay $500 for four passports. If legislators are questioning what we are doing, we can imagine what the public have to say about it.
The resolution was passed unanimously by this body and letters were sent to the Prime Minister and the President. I would ask the member, who is in the governing party, if he will help. I believe it would help the tourist operators and the hunters and trappers of this country a lot if he were to use his good offices and his powers of persuasion within his caucus and among his cabinet members to encourage the government to look at dealing with the passport issue.
By the way, I should point out that Canadians have a much bigger uptake in passports than Americans do. While 50% of Canadians have passports, only 25% of Americans do.
At the conference, the resolution that was passed unanimously—