Madam Speaker, I want to say a few words about the motion before the House today. I say at the outset the our party supports the idea of having a Canada Information Office.
In other words, we disagree with the Bloc motion that the office should be disbanded altogether. There should be a Canada Information Office to help provide information about government programs across the country. That is a legitimate role. It is bit of a double standard for the Bloc to say that it should be closed entirely. There are similar agencies in the province of Quebec that provide information about Quebec government programs to the population of that province. That is where we stand as a party.
I hope the minister would agree that we have to make very sure and clear that this is a government information office for the Government of Canada and not for the Liberal Party or any other party. That is a fine line that can sometimes be crossed. It may not be by this minister or the next minister, but it could be the next minister or next party thereafter.
When there are government information offices in any democratic society it is always very sensitive that the role of the office be very clearly defined in terms of providing legitimate information and facts about government institutions, programs and policies to the population of a particular country and that it not cross the line into partisan politics. Once that happens we all have problems in terms of the legitimacy of governments programs, government spending and the whole national unity cause, which is the most important aspect here.
The Canada Information Office was established after the 1995 referendum, which was nearly a disaster. It was very close indeed. There was a feeling among many people including myself that there had to be a co-ordinating office for the Government of Canada to provide information, not just in Quebec but across the country, about federal institutions and federal programs.
Maybe we should take a look at its mandate and make sure that issues are more clearly defined. I think that is a legitimate question. These things should always be reviewed. Maybe we should look at the budget of $21 billion. Perhaps it is not necessary today. Perhaps it is a bit high.
By the way, I am told that amount would be enough to keep the CBC on air in the four Atlantic provinces, which is important to Canadians. It is also enough money to keep many thousands of hospital beds open for many months in all parts of Canada. That is extremely important to our citizens. There are many other priorities.
As I said at the outset, we need a Canadian information office. We need a co-ordinating body to provide information. Most provinces do that. Certainly the Government of Quebec does that. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea, but this agency has to be scrutinized like any other agency of government.
I have some concerns about some of the activities undertaken by that office, for example, the monitoring of some activities of certain journalists, a lot of which is legitimate, in terms of keeping tabs on what certain journalists say about the important issues of federalism and national unity. Sometimes it goes a bit overboard.
Edison Stewart is a very prominent reporter for the Toronto Star . Many members of the House and I know him well. He was monitored by the Canada Information Office because he had written pieces that were skeptical of the office in terms of its role, mandate and spending. I do not think some of the things said about him were necessary work for the Canada Information Office. By the way, he is no longer an employee of the Toronto Star . He has taken a job with the treasury board. He is hardly a person who is not supportive of the overall institutions of federal government and the promotion of legitimate government policies in the country.
I would watch those kinds of things in terms of not going overboard as has been done. The Bloc has released the names of some journalists where there has probably been undue monitoring of people in the media and the press. That being said, I think there is a legitimate role for the agency.
In the 1995 campaign the criticism was on the other side. Many people were very critical of the Prime Minister and the federal government not being better prepared for the referendum, not having their ducks in order and not having the plan in place for that referendum. That referendum was almost lost. That is why we need an agency like this one which is a bit of a quarterback in terms of providing government information. It must be stressed that it has to be government information, not propaganda for the political party in place. That is a fine line.
I must also tell my Bloc Quebecois friends that, if I am not mistaken, there were Quebec government agencies doing the same thing in that province, there were agencies promoting government programs in Quebec. The same thing is done in my province of Saskatchewan and in every Canadian province. It is important to have an agency that tells people about the policies of the government, not those of the political party forming the government.
In Saskatchewan, it is the NDP, and also in Manitoba and British Columbia. Here, it is the Liberal Party. In the Province of Quebec, it is the Parti Quebecois. It is important to have an agency that represents legitimate government interests, and not the partisan position of one political party or another.
The CIO was established after the 1995 referendum because we almost lost the country. This was a referendum where the results were very close, split almost 50-50 between the yes and the no vote.
It is important to remember that national unity is not just about information. We must have a very strong country, and an economy that is very strong and very fair for all Canadians.
When I look at the government right now, I see that it has cut too deeply into our social programs. I am thinking in particular of medicare, which has been slashed by the Liberal government. The one big difference between this country and the United States lies in social programs such as medicare. This is something that unifies the country from coast to coast. It is very important. Right now, we have a federal government that is only contributing 13, 14 or 15 cents out of every dollar spent on medicare throughout Canada.
I remember very clearly how, years ago, Tommy Douglas, the leader of the federal NDP, as well as the premier of my province of Saskatchewan, established medicare. In the 1960s—1966 or 1967—medicare was introduced Canada-wide by Lester B. Pearson. At that time, the federal government paid 50% of the cost of medicare in our country, and the provinces paid the other 50%. Now, the provinces are paying almost 85% or 87%, while the federal government is paying between 13% and 15%.
It is the lack of confidence in our federal government—I am not talking about the Liberal Party here—the lack of confidence in our social programs, such as medicare, and the lack of confidence in our education system and many other things that are contributing to the lack of national unity.
In our country, we can now afford to rebuild our social safety net, to have the best health care system, the best social programs, the best transportation system and the best communications system in the world. We have the money to do all that. With a very strong economy, we also have the flexibility to reorganize the federation immediately. We can recognize Quebec as a distinct society.
I was in favour of the Meech Lake accord and worked very hard on that proposal ten or twelve years ago. The current Prime Minister was against the Meech Lake accord. My friends remember vividly the role he played, ten or twelve year ago, with Clyde Wells and even with Mr. McKenna, who was the Premier of New Brunswick at that time. We saw the beginning of a rift during the Meech Lake discussions.
In this country, we still need to have an open mind and recognize Quebec as being different, unique and distinct. It is something we can celebrate everywhere in Canada. We also need some flexibility in our federation on the part of the other provinces, in another sense, and we need to recognize the right of aboriginal people to self-government. This is very important.
We can do all that since we have the money and we have a population that is diversified and open to new ideas. It is easier to have new ideas in a strong economy. It is easier to be generous when there is money in one's pockets. It is easier to have new ideas when there is money in one's pockets.
That is why national unity is not only about information on government, not only about having a new constitution, not only about such things but also about social programs like health insurance and a communications system such as CBC and Radio-Canada to unify this country.
What we have now, however, is a government that is in the process of slashing the budget of CBC and Radio-Canada. The Liberal government has reduced their budget more than Brian Mulroney's Conservative government. It may be a bit surprising to see a Liberal government doing this, to see that it is more conservative than the Conservatives, but such actions do not promote national unity.
We need the CBC and Radio-Canada. They are part of our national unity. We need a good communications system in what has become the largest country in the world. Now we are bigger, in terms of geography, than Russia. In this country, when we talk of national unity, we need a public broadcasting system, a public communications system.
The Canada Information Office is important, but it is only a small step toward national unity. As I said in French, the one thing that really sets us apart as Canadians from Americans is the fact that we have good, progressive social programs in Canada. I am talking about the national health care program, which is progressive.
There are a lot of things that unite us.
I look at my friends in the Bloc Quebecois and I see many similarities between Quebec and western Canada, in terms of the co-operative movement, the credit unions and the caisses populaires. I see many similarities in terms of community spirit and people working together. I see many similarities in terms of the social democrats of the New Democratic Party in western Canada and social democrats in the province of Quebec. If we could somehow organize and strengthen our similarities we could create a very strong and powerful country.
Too often we concentrate on the negatives, on the things that divide us. Too often we have politicians who practise the politics of division. We see that particularly in this parliament. Basically, we have five regional political parties, with Reform being the party of the three western provinces and the Conservative Party being the party of the Atlantic. My party represents the west and the Atlantic. The Liberal Party is basically the party of Ontario.
By definition, the Bloc Quebecois is the party of Quebec. We are all divided.
We tend to speak for regional interests. We could get rid of some of that. We could change our electoral system and bring in a mix of proportional representation so that whatever party gets 20% of the votes in the country would get roughly 20% of the seats. That would foster national unity because it would force each party in the country to have a national vision of where it wanted to go. A vote in Quebec for the Canadian Alliance would be as important as a vote in downtown Calgary. It would be the same thing for the NDP, the Liberals, the Conservatives or the Bloc Quebecois. It would force political parties to have a national vision. We are one of only three countries in the world with more than eight million people which does not have some semblance of proportional representation in our electoral system.
Along with electoral reform, we could reform this place to make the role of members of parliament more meaningful. We could strengthen the committees of the House and provide them with more independence. We could have more free votes and fewer confidence votes. We could take away power from the executive and the prime minister and restore power to parliament, where it belongs, to make this place more democratic and more accountable. Those are the kinds of things that would foster national unity, a stronger country and a sense of nationalism and Canadian identity from one ocean to the second ocean to the third ocean, right across the country. Those are the things that have to happen.
For example, why should a prime minister have so much power that the prime minister by himself, and except for one brief exception it was always by himself, appoints not just cabinet ministers, but the heads of all agencies, crown corporations and supreme court justices without any kind of democratic vetting of those appointments and without any kind of democratic accounting by the relevant parliamentary committee? That is too much power to focus in one person's hands.
I have not even said a word about the Senate, which is probably the most important place of political patronage in the history of the country, where the prime minister appoints his or her friends every few months to an office where they can serve until they are 75 years old without any democratic accountability or legitimacy whatsoever.
The whole question of national unity is one which involves more than simply proper information about what the federal government is doing. In fact, that is only a very small part of it. It should involve constitutional change, electoral change and democratic change in terms of our institutions. We should have a vision of an economy that is more equal and more just for each and every citizen; a vision of a country where the ordinary working family gets a more equal part of the national pie, where we have social programs that are fully funded, where unemployment insurance is fully funded, as well as health care, and where we have money for post-secondary education. If we did those things we would do more to foster national unity than anything else.
I look back on the heyday of national unity, which was really in the 1960s with the great celebration in Montreal of Expo '67. We had prosperity. We had great visions. Social programs were being born. The Canada pension plan was being born. People were happy. They were celebrating this country. The Victoria Charter was introduced, which would radically change the country. Six or seven provinces had agreed to become officially bilingual. There was all kinds of movement in the country, with inspirational leadership from people like Tommy Douglas, Lester Pearson and Bob Stanfield, who were in this House, and premiers like Robarts.
There were dreams. They did things then which made the country better, more progressive and more sensitive to diversity. They celebrated diversity, bilingualism and multiculturalism, and they tried to build things for our aboriginal people.
If we did those kinds of things in the future, we could have more national unity.
