Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the hon. member for Western Arctic for his work on Bill C-530. He is also an extremely hard-working and determined member of Parliament and the citizens of Western Arctic are getting extremely good value re-electing him time after time as their member of Parliament.
I was very surprised by the speech of the government member. He is normally a very restrained and thoughtful speaker but today he is out of character. It demonstrates that the government has run up the white flag on this bill. I think it can see that the three opposition parties will be voting together and will have sufficient votes to send it to committee and well it should be because it is a very well constructed and very good bill.
The parliamentary secretary fails to understand his role and the government's role in Parliament. The fact is that the Canadian government or any government for that matter in the parliamentary system survives at the pleasure of Parliament. The parliamentary secretary has one vote in the House as the member for Western Arctic does. This Parliament is a sovereign body. The parliamentary secretary has no right to berate any member of the House for simply doing his or her job. That is what the member was doing.
I was very impressed with the speech by the member for Yukon. He rightly came to the defence of the member to put the government in its place and make the government understand what its role really is.
The member for Yukon pointed out that there is a devolution agreement already in place for Yukon. It separates it from the other territories to a certain degree because there is a different level of authority between one territory and another.
Another issue that we need to deal with is that we are at second reading of the bill. Second reading of any bill is to deal with the principle of the bill. We are not supposed to be spending our time in our speeches going through the minutia of the bill and discussing it clause by clause and point by point. The whole reason for second reading debate is whether or not members agree or disagree with the principle behind the bill.
That is why I argue many times in my own caucus that on second reading if we agree with the principle then we should be supporting the bill. I think, by and large, more often than not we should be voting together in Parliament to support bills at second reading if we agree with the principle.
What the government has done tonight is to simply to say that it does not even agree with the principle. We just had the Prime Minister a few months ago go up to the Arctic and talk about Arctic sovereignty and how we need to spend gazillions of dollars there to keep the Russians at bay and all the other enemies that he sees out there at bay because we want to be able to extend our arguments for sovereignty over minerals and oil exploration as far north as we can.
That is what the bill would do. The bill would facilitate our goal of extending our sovereignty in this country. That is another reason that I am very surprised and disappointed at the parliamentary secretary's response to the bill. The bill does not ask for a lot. It asks that a territory to be able to extend its borrowing capacity.
I want to reference something the member pointed out in his speech, which is that on March 26, Moody's Investors Services gave the Northwest Territories a AA1 rating, which is the second highest rating and places the Northwest Territories in line for credit risk with most of the provinces. This is the second year in a row that Moody's has issued the Northwest Territories such a high rating.
I know how important Moody's Investors Services and all these rating agencies are. These are world-class rating agencies. They rate securities, bonds and governments.
I was a member of the legislature in Manitoba for 23 years and before that I worked as an executive assistant to a minister in the Ed Schreyer government, which was elected first in 1969. Finance ministers of all provinces care a lot about Moody's and the other financial houses in terms of their ratings. They routinely get on a plane two or three times a year and go cap in hand to New York to be interviewed by representatives of these investment houses in order to get that all important good credit rating. They know that if their credit rating slips, the borrowing costs will be a lot more and it could mean a lot of money. This is very good news that the Northwest Territories has the capacity to get a credit rating like this.
The other issue concerns what it is borrowing. Is the federal government somehow lending the money, putting up the money and guaranteeing the money? The member has explained how the territory has always paid its bills and operates very fiscally responsibly. We would wish that the government would do the same.
There is another issue that the territories might look at, if this bill is successful. I think it will be successful with the Bloc, the Liberals and the NDP voting for it. It is just a matter of time before we actually get this bill passed. However, there are a lot of creative financing possibilities and opportunities that jurisdictions and provinces can take upon themselves. I will give an example.
Twenty years ago, in 1986 in Manitoba, the government looked at selling bonds. Some of our backbench MLAs, one of them in particular, one of my former colleagues, suggested in the caucus that we sell Manitoba government bonds, that we sell Manitoba Hydro bonds. Guess what? Two years later, Manitoba Hydro was issuing its own bonds to citizens of Manitoba.
Does that not make a lot more sense than borrowing money in New York or on the foreign market, or perhaps even with a foreign exchange and other currencies? We have all been burned on currency exchanges over the years by borrowing in Swiss francs, Dutch guilders or German marks. What we did, which is what other provinces have done, was take out the bond right in Manitoba. We had Manitobans buying our bonds and keeping the money in the province. The interest on the bonds was staying in the province.
I know, for example, that Air North airlines in the member for Yukon's riding is a big success story. It has its headquarters, its commissary and its flight crews in Whitehorse. It is a real asset to that community. Even its financing is very positive, as far as I am concerned, because it sells shares to people in Yukon.
When I was up there last year, I talked to a person who worked as a server in the local hotel. She is thrilled with Air North because she bought $5,000 worth of shares, she gets one or two free flights a year, and she gets a return on her investment. That is the type of local investment that we want to encourage within our local jurisdictions, and that can be done. It is not the Conservative approach that everything needs to be done through Goldman Sachs and other financial houses on the advice of these houses on foreign markets.
The member who is on the finance committee may laugh about that, but there are many ways to raise funds. We are saying that if we give people a local stake in their enterprises, we will see a much more solid enterprise in the long term.
I have not even begun to go through the notes that I have with respect to this debate. The parliamentary secretary got me to respond the way I did. I really did not expect that kind of attitude from the government. As the member for the Bloc said, I sure hope the government does not have that attitude when the three opposition parties pass this bill on to committee where it belongs.
