Mr. Speaker, I remember when the Prime Minister referred to Atlantic Canada and Atlantic Canadians as having a culture of defeat. He said that as an opposition leader. Since then he has gone from contempt for the region to neglect. It is a region that is struggling, particularly the Maritimes. Newfoundland and Labrador are fortunate that, based on natural resources, they are seeing some progress. That is a good thing. However, the Maritimes are struggling. It is not just the cuts to EI benefits and changes that have been negative for the region, but it is a real lack of leadership on issues where traditionally federal governments played leadership roles in our region.
On the issue of immigration, the Maritime provinces have a terrifying demographic trend before us whereby our populations are teetering on decline and are aging rather significantly. As a result, we will see a diminishing of the labour pool and the productive capacity of our region. We need immigration. When provincial governments and the Maritimes came to the current government, they were told that it would not raise the cap and it would not enable them to bring in more immigrants.
In our region we ought to be working on a future Liberal government that would work with the provincial governments. For instance, we would look at the Manitoba model for immigration. We would ask ourselves if we could do that in our region, if we could work with the federal government to change our immigration strategy to have perhaps even a unified immigration strategy among the maritime provinces, so that they would have a greater capacity to attract and retain more new Canadians to our region.
There is a lack of vision in the federal government for Atlantic Canada, which reflects a lack of creativity in terms of public policy. It also reflects a lack of compassion or real interest in moving our region forward. Most importantly, it reflects a lack of understanding of the potential of the maritime and Atlantic Canadian people and the capacity through leadership for us to harness that innovation, which could do so much to create jobs and prosperity for our region.