Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from Kitchener Centre not only on her maiden speech but also on her excellent replies.
It is very difficult to come into the House and suddenly face opposition questions. It will be difficult to follow that act, as it were, but I will try to do my very best.
I will begin by commenting on the speech in reply to the Speech from the Throne by the member for Calgary Southwest, the Leader of the Opposition. I draw the attention of the House to two points he made.
He condemned the Speech from the Throne because it did not state anything about the accountability of MPs. I find this rather confusing because MPs are naturally very accountable. We are one of the most accountable people in the land simply because if the people of Canada, the electorate, do not like us or are not satisfied with us they can fire us every four or five years, or whatever the case may be. They can fire us nonetheless. The Reform Party and hopefully some of the new parties might bear that in mind.
The other point is that the member for Calgary Southwest probably meant we should be seeking more accountability from government machinery. We are all here to try to make government run better and more effectively for Canadians. One of the ways of achieving that is to strive for more accountability within government machinery, all government departments. All MPs on all sides of the House share this responsibility. We express this responsibility by the questions we pose in committee.
I spent some time on the government operations committee when we scrutinized a number of departments and found a number of flaws. Many of the flaws were due to a lack of accountability. I am quite happy to say that the search for better government was not exclusively Liberal. It was predominantly Liberal, but I was assisted by my colleagues, members of the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois.
As MPs we are accountable. It is the machinery of government we must scrutinize. Reform Party members certainly have no exclusivity on the desire to bring accountability to government and to reform government. Just because they have the name Reform in their party title does not mean they are the only MPs who seek reform.
The member for Calgary Southwest also criticized the Speech from the Throne because it devolved certain responsibilities that were once federal to the provinces. The member for Calgary Southwest complained this devolution was done purely for administrative means. He said that his party, were it in power, would have passed a bill and made these changes statutory. He is referring to transferring certain responsibilities for forestry, social housing, mining and several other issues to the provinces.
I remind members opposite that Ontario is experiencing the consequences of transferring power, that is the power to control the responsibility for social housing. What happens when it is given to a provincial government that does not have the same spirit of generosity and caring as the federal government?
In Ontario right now there is a controversy. The Ontario government wants to have no responsibility whatsoever for looking after the poor and the disadvantaged people in society who occupy social housing. Now it is devolving it to the municipalities.
The lesson for us is that we ought to make sure that when we transfer federal powers we transfer them in a way in which we can take them back if we need do so. That is the situation in Ontario.
More unfortunate in the remarks of the Leader of the Opposition was that he suggested transfers of responsibilities should be done by statutes. When he says that, because he is talking about provincial and federal powers, he can only mean changes to the Constitution.
All Canadians from sea to sea were fed up with attempts to change the Constitution by a previous party that I would prefer to leave nameless in the House. Canadians do not want to see tampering with the Constitution. It is the last thing Canadians want. I am absolutely amazed the Leader of the Opposition should propose going into the Constitution again.
All I can say is good luck. Look at what happened to a former Conservative prime minister.
I have to come to the Speech from the Throne.
I am sorry, but I found it a bit uninspiring. I think that the throne speech lacked eloquence and inspiration. The ideas are good, they are all good, but the speech did not have what I was looking for.
Fortunately the next day the Prime Minister spoke on the Speech from the Throne, and I found his remarks full of eloquence and ideas. I found him eloquent on the subject of the government's ideas.
I especially like the idea in the prime minister's remarks of supporting young people. I have to tell the House that I wanted to see the Speech from the Throne talk about citizenship, getting rid of the monarchy and a number of other things. Instead I found a Speech from the Throne that was directed to helping Canada's youth. One of the most important points in the prime minister's remarks was the fact that he proposed more exchanges of young people across Canada. He mentioned that when he was young he remembers sitting in kitchens in Saskatchewan, shooting pool in Newfoundland and that kind of thing.
I can relate to that because when I was young I travelled across Canada, the first time out to the Rockies, into Reform country if you will, and saw the Rocky Mountains for the first time. I was inspired. It is beautiful country. Any Reform MP who is from the Rockies or the prairies should be proud of it.
Similarly later I visited Quebec. I visited first Montreal and then Quebec City, actually right at the height of the FLQ crisis.
What I found was a unique and vibrant society, whose language I did not understand. A marvellous society. I have become a federalist with my heart in the mountains and in the province of Quebec, because of that.
I think the prime minister is right on when he said that the new Parliament and the Speech from the Throne, even though it did not express it very well, but he expressed it so much better, should be about the future generation, the new generation of Canadians, Canada's young people.
I would like to conclude with a quote. The prime minister said this part of his speech in English and so with a certain amount of pride and perhaps trepidation I will attempt to say the prime minister's words in French. Here is what he said and I do not think I could say it better.
He said:
We have built that nation and we continue to shape its elements. Our young will do so in the next century. Their architecture will be new but it will be Canadian. Greatness may have a different meaning, but it will still be Canadian.
That is the essence of the Speech from the Throne.
