I hear a member opposite saying that I should apologize. I will never apologize for asking questions in the House on behalf of my constituents. Let me make that very clear. If we turn this place into a politically correct place where we cannot ask questions on behalf of our constituents, then we cannot represent them. I express in the House opinions from all sides of the spectrum. Those who were here in the last Parliament will know that. Mostly I speak to Reform policy, but there were many occasions on which I brought forward points of view from my constituents which disagreed with Reform policy. I see that as my duty.
To get on to the matter at hand, I was happy to hear that the hon. leader of the NDP was pleased with her father's contribution. By being a successful business person he was able to support the political philosophy of which he was in favour.
It reminded me of another famous socialist from a different country, the Hon. David Lange, who was prime minister of New Zealand. I had the good fortune to meet with him for about two hours in 1995. He told me about the terrible problems he went through in 1983 when New Zealand was on the verge of bankruptcy and the awful decisions he had to make as a Labour Party prime minister, which is equivalent to the NDP.
He told me that he had come to recognize that you cannot have good social programs unless you have a vibrant private sector. I believe that relates very well to what the leader of the NDP said when she said that by her father having a successful business he was able to contribute to the goals of his political philosophy.
I think that is something that we really need to remember here. If we treat business as the enemy in trying to achieve the things that the NDP are trying to achieve, then we are really not going to get any progress down that road at all.
Reform unfortunately is not in a position to support the motion as it is written because we really feel it is illogical. It mixes the cause and effect and really contains a lot of erroneous assumptions that do not tie together.
For example, the motion suggests that measures to bring government spending under control lead to high unemployment. I would venture to say that the evidence throughout the world is exactly the opposite.
If we look, for example, close to home at the Klein government in Alberta, by reducing government spending dramatically, running surpluses and reducing taxes, the unemployment levels in Alberta have plunged. It is the place in Canada right now that is generating a huge number of jobs and the economy there is really barrelling along.
We can look at the Harris government of Ontario and see similar sorts of things beginning to happen now. The Harris government was preceded by an NDP government which followed the sorts of policies that are being proposed by the NDP where this tax and spend philosophy actually kills jobs. It creates unemployment.
We can look to the United States where any of the states that have cut taxes and reduced government spending have created jobs. In New Zealand, where I am originally from, the unemployment level there now is below 5%. Yet the government is only one-third of the size it was in 1983.
The evidence is overwhelmingly opposite to what is being proposed by the NDP in the motion.
I did mention the NDP government in Ontario. In 1990 it tried to spend its way out of the 1990 recession. All it did was bring the province to the edge of bankruptcy.
We see the same problems happening in B.C. where the NDP government there was the beneficiary of enormous amounts of inflowing foreign investment for a few years and it disguised its inability to get control of the spending, but now those pigeons are coming home to roost and we are starting to get into a much more difficult situation in B.C.
Also, if government spending on job creation could create jobs, we already have a $600 billion debt in Canada, enormous deficits that have been run up starting with the Liberal government in the late seventies; enormous debt that has been incurred in the lifetime of the average 20-year old who is out working right now. With that huge terrible debt of $600 billion, if government spending created jobs we would all have three by now because that is an enormous amount of money.
What we see is that the government pours money into programs that create short term temporary jobs that really go nowhere such as heavy water plants that produce a product for which there is no market, grants and subsidies to steel mills or coal mines that cannot market competitive productss, airports which are beautiful facilities that have no flights coming in.
There is a famous company in my area of the country. Ballard Technologies, which everyone is in love with at the moment, has received huge infusions of government money. It is disguising what the truth is about fuel cells. Nobody ever asks where the hydrogen comes from to run all these fuel cells. When we ask that question we discover it comes from the decomposition of natural gas, from fractional distillation of air, from hydrolysis or some other process that uses enormous amounts of energy to create the hydrogen in the first place. It is very convenient to ignore the fact that pollution is being created somewhere else to make all this hydrogen to run a fuel cell so that somebody can say this is a nice little non-polluting fuel cell. It is only half the story.
If we really look at the whole process we find that it is completely uneconomical. It is cheaper, more efficient and cleaner to run a bus on a natural gas engine than it is to generate hydrogen somewhere and run it on a fuel cell.
Yet no one asks the question. The government blindly runs in huge grants to this company, ploughing money into it, buoying up its reputation. Now its shares have shot up to something $85 a week or two ago and yet I still do not think people are asking the right questions before they put government money into a company that has never made a profit and has no hope of doing so for a long time, maybe never.
These are the sorts of ways the government wastes money, claiming to create jobs when all it is doing is giving certain companies unfair advantages in the marketplace and moving jobs from one place to another.
Another flaw in the motion is that it trivializes the negative consequences of the monetary policy we have with regard to inflation. It was not long ago that Canadians were facing mortgage interest rates of 16% or more because we had run up such huge government debt. In 1993 when the Reform party was trying to get governments to start controlling their spending, and we should take a lot of credit for moving the Liberal government in that direction, 80% of the new money we were borrowing was coming from overseas. Those lenders were demanding high interest rates because of the huge debt that had been built up by the government.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You have to get to a low inflation and low interest rates by controlling government spending. It ends up creating jobs.
A couple of speakers from the NDP mentioned that banks should be forced to plough more money into the community. Credit unions in British Columbia do exactly that and I assume that credit unions in other parts of the country would do the same thing. Surely we do not need to change the rules. We just need to encourage people to switch from a bank to a credit union. I think the credit unions are already trying to do that. Instead of having more government interference, we should let the marketplace make that change.
I have a huge amount of material here on health care and things we could do to create new jobs. For example, the U.K., New Zealand and Sweden have all allowed some choice in health care. They have managed to increase the number of jobs in health care tremendously. We could certainly benefit from the experiences of those countries.
I realize my time has expired. It is unfortunate that we do not have more time to spend on this. I look forward to perhaps being part of questions and comments later in the day.
