Mr. Speaker, I point out to the hon. member opposite that he must have been working on that question for me during the first 15 minutes of my presentation. At that time I spent a fair amount of time talking about the towers of gold and feet of clay and what led to it and how that came about.
Certainly no one would ever see me standing and defending the banks. The banks certainly do not need any defence by me nor would they be likely to get it.
The second question had to do with the role of government in regulation in the oil and gas industry and in particular the auto pact. Government has a legitimate role to play in the financial affairs of the country. However, the legitimate role should be to ensure that the marketplace is fair, to ensure that competition exists, to ensure that consumers are not taken advantage of by any industry that has an oligopoly or a monopoly. We are talking about the banking industry as an oligopoly.
The government has a role to play in water resources, in resources like oil and gas. We have to ensure that we have a competitive marketplace, that we have a tax structure for instance that encourages people to invest their money in the oil and gas industry.
The government does not have a role to play in picking winners and losers in the marketplace. It does not have a role to play in taking money from me and giving it to somebody else and saying: "You are the business that we want".
Hon. members opposite pointed out the role of government in their science and technology review. Some of the most esteemed people in the country came together under the auspices of the Department of Industry to discuss science and technology in Canada. They said it is not the role of the government to pick winners and losers but to assist winners that have been decided by the marketplace.
I realize that it is very difficult to make the distinction but there is a distinction. The marketplace decides who the winners are and what has to be done to support them. The way we can support winners in industry is by making sure that we have a steady supply of educated and trained people as a workforce for them. That is one of the things that we can do.
The member opposite asks: "What about Bell helicopters?" What about Bell helicopters? We throw all that money at Bell helicopters. What about Boeing? It is talking about picking up its toys and going home because we ended up buying some air buses.
We get involved in deciding who are going to be winners and who are going to be losers. I am trying desperately not to bring up the names of Lavelin-Bombardier and that whole group in the aerospace industry. How much of what that company has done would have been done had we not gone to them with a public purse and they had had to do it themselves.
The shareholders of Bombardier-Lavelin are the ones that get the benefits. Joe Taxpayer earning $10 an hour is not getting a nickel from them.
