Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to also add a few comments, thoughts and ideas on the bill.
I cannot help but wonder why it is that we feel it is a legitimate role of government to pluck the pockets of the taxpayers by the coercive process called taxation without giving them a choice. We are forcing them against their will to support any and every cause which some bureaucrat or some deputy minister or some head of a department decides is worthy.
My hon. colleague from Medicine Hat has just gone through some of these ridiculous decisions which have absolutely no defence in terms of representing the mainstream of Canadian society.
I am one of those proud Canadians who was born here. I am a first generation Canadian. My parents did not speak English. My first language was neither English nor French. I could be called one of those ethnic immigrants although I was born in Saskatchewan, a point of which I am justly proud.
When we were growing up we had absolutely no access to public funds. As a matter of fact, my grandfather would have dutifully declined if it had been offered because he firmly believed that it was his responsibility to provide for and look after his family.
My grandfather and his sons, my dad and his brothers worked out at a very low wage in order to keep their identity and their
pride. I am very happy that is my heritage. I learned too that hard work and self-effort was required in order to get ahead.
When different people are able, by the spending power of the federal government, to merely access money at will and use it however they wish without accountability, whether or not it has any measure of support out there in the public, promotes and extends a standard of dependence. There is no excuse for that in the long run.
We are sometimes criticized in the Reform Party for harping on the debt. I cannot think of anything that is more important. Whether it is an individual, a family, a business, a province, a municipality or a country, we need to be sound financially if we want to be sound in other ways.
This morning I could not help but think of this when one of my colleagues from the Bloc was speaking. Perhaps part of the reason for the desire of divorce is the fact that we have such tremendous fiscal mismanagement. I read in a book not long ago that fiscal mismanagement and debt is one of the leading causes of divorce in families. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Bloc members are representing a lack of trust and a lack of consideration for remaining in our Confederation.
We need to start looking at the use of our federal moneys much more carefully than we do. This whole department is a sinkhole of money that does not go anywhere. I cannot overemphasize this any more than I just have.
We have the problem of grants to different societal groups. I think about the past generations. In my area there are a number of Ukrainians and German speaking people as well as English speaking people in great numbers. Most of them, when they came out west, were independent, rugged pioneers. They would not accept handouts.
We keep talking about how we want to be tolerant and loving, we want to be multicultural. I agree with that profoundly. We need to reach out and touch each other, as the good phrase goes. We are building resentment by these programs. One group asks for a grant and they get so much. Another group asks for a grant, but because they do not have as powerful a connection to the decision makers, the grant is less or perhaps is even denied.
This can only produce one result. One group now resents the other group. The only real way of having a level playing field among all these different ethnic groups and promoting true ethnicity in our country is to treat them the same. Allow them to fund themselves at whatever rate they want to. Frankly most of the practice of ethnic culture does not require any money.
I was proud the other day to attend the meeting in this city with the Greeks, the AHEPA, their educational society.
They had put on a dinner and they wanted to inform us about their society. A wonderful thing happened. This was a formal occasion and those who could afford it-of course I was not among them-had tuxedos with black ties. It was a very elegant situation.
Suddenly some of those people gathered around the piano. There was one person there playing piano and two or three people came and started singing. It did not take long until there were about 20 people crowded around the piano. In this formal setting this little informal occasion had arisen.
We did not need a federal grant for that. That happened. It was spontaneous. It was genuine. It was real. I liked it. That is the kind of thing we need to promote. The federal government should be in the role of guaranteeing the freedom to speak in the country any language we want, guaranteeing the freedom to practise our culture any way we can legally. We ought not to be in the business of taking money and transferring it from the taxpayers, often against their will. We know there is an increasing resentment and a decreasing support for this involuntary taxation.
We can help renew that trust of the Canadian people by reducing the amount of money that we take from them in order to promote and give grants to people without just cause.
I want to say something about the CBC. My hon. colleague from the Bloc made mention of funding and that it was not equitable between French and English. I wrote it down while he was speaking that in the area whereof I speak, and this is just a statistical fact, the English speaking people in Alberta outnumber all of the others.
We also have a great number of people who speak Ukrainian. There are German people and I believe the French place fourth, although they may now be even lower in numbers because of quite a bit of immigration from the Orient in recent years.
We have a French television channel there, CBC. Most of the time it broadcasts the test pattern and plays nice music. I admit I sometimes watch it because I like the background music that is on while it displays the test pattern. That is other than the times it just has the 1,000 kilohertz signal.
We fund that. I do not know how new my statistics are, probably two or three years ago, but only about one per cent of Albertans speak French, and of those if I remember correctly only one-quarter spoke French but not English.
If our objective is to communicate with one another it is only important that we speak the same language. How I wish I could speak French so that I could debate and enter into discourse with
my colleagues to my right here. I wish I knew that language. Unfortunately when I was a youngster I did not learn it and I am discouraged at trying now. It is difficult. It is so important for us to be able to communicate with one another. Spending federal money on promoting French broadcasting of the test pattern in Alberta makes no sense, absolutely none.
I would like to see those funds, if continued to be expended, to be used in an area where at least the people hearing the programming can understand it and benefit from it.
It is atrocious that when we have television and radio stations that make a profit-I am told by some of my contacts that radio these days is very competitive-we need to subsidize the CBC at the rate of over $1 billion per year. Surely we can get management in there that will produce a profit for the Canadian taxpayers and not be a continual drain.
