1993-03-22

[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Friday, February 26, consideration of the motion of Mr. Waddell (p. 16093):
Mr. Waddell:: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.
This matter is votable today if five members rise. There has been an agreement that the vote, if it is to come, will be deferred to six o'clock to make it more convenient for members. I wanted to say that before the debate begins.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is there unanimous consent to defer the vote until six o'clock?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Mr. Chris Axworthy (Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and participate in the debate on the motion:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider the advisability of introducing legislation on the subject of euthanasia and, in particular, of ensuring that those assisting terminally ill patients who wish to die not be subject to criminal liability.
This matter has been raised and discussed in this House a number of times over the last year. In fact this is the fourth time it has been raised. The debate on each occasion has been an interesting one. It has been carried
on with great seriousness, compassion and caring for the issue at hand and for those people who face a long and agonizing death from a terminal illness.
Canadians have spoken out consistently in favour of some changes to the legislation, to the Criminal Code. These changes would permit Canadians who are nearing the end of their lives, who are faced with a prognosis that is discouraging and does not suggest any opportunity for improvement in their condition causing either physical and emotional pain and suffering or both, and who have a firm commitment and desire to do so, to end their lives, seek assistance in ending their lives if it is not possible for them to do so themselves.
In response to a Gallup poll question, which Gallup has been asking for the last 20 years, dealing with the legalization of physician assistance in dying, consistently over the last decade 75 per cent of respondents to the Gallup poll have argued in favour of some changes to the legislation.
In many phone-in radio shows and television shows that I have done on this subject, that 75 per cent figure is approximately the ratio in which the respondents on the radio and television shows presented their arguments. About 70 to 75 per cent of people phoning in to radio and TV shows that I have done supported liberalizing the law with regard to physician assistance in dying.
It is time that this Parliament acted on this issue. It is rare that such a large proportion of Canadians are of a common mind about anything, especially an issue of this importance. It is time that this House responded to that very large majority view.
Over the last little while we have seen some tragic cases in which Canadians have had to plead to courts to have the permission to end their lives when they are living in intolerable pain and suffering.

Private Members' Business
There was the Nancy B. case in which it was felt necessary to have court-sanctioned permission for the physician to remove Nancy B. from her life support systems. Surely that sort of trial and turmoil for a patient, for a person living in great pain and great suffering toward the end of their life is undignified and should not be required in Canada.
Most recently, we have seen the case of Sue Rodriguez. I do not think anybody in this Chamber or many Canadians would want to have to go through the same torture she is going through in trying to get permission to ask a physician to assist her in ending her life when she concludes that her quality of life is such that she can no longer continue. She wants to have the opportunity to have the assistance of a physician to end her life, and we know what she is having to go through in order to obtain that.
Surely that is undignified in Canada. Surely it is uncaring and uncompassionate. Surely it is something that we have to do something about.
We have been called upon to act in this matter by the Chief Justice of British Columbia, Chief Justice McEa-chern, who in a decision which considered the issues carefully and with great compassion, argued that while in individual cases a court could respond appropriately the issue should be dealt with at the level of national public interest because, after all, that is where it needs to be addressed.
We are really asking for people to have the right to choose to end their lives under very restrictive circumstances. We are also asking for physicians who assist in that act in that compassionate and caring situation to be protected from criminal sanction.
The Chief Justice of British Columbia has urged this House to act, and this House has the opportunity to respond positively to the motion of my colleague from Port Moody-Coquitlam.
At the moment we have a situation in which the only restraints on physician assistance in dying are contained in physicians' codes of ethics. We know that across this country patients are assisted in the dying process by physicians every day. We also know that physicians are concerned about the repercussions of potential criminal
sanction as a result of responding to their patient's wishes. It is time that we allowed those physicians who act on their patient's wishes out of compassion and caring to do so without fear of criminal sanction.
It would be a progressive response for this House to respond positively to the member's motion. I congratulate the member on bringing this issue to the House of Commons. It is not every day that controversial issues are raised by members of Parliament.
It is appropriate that the House of Commons is faced with these difficult issues because it is surely a question for society as a whole to respond to, and this House through its legislative powers and responsibilities lays down what is appropriate for society in many respects.
Is it not the time for us to say that people who are nearing the end of their lives and whose quality of life is unacceptable to them because of the physical or emotional pain and suffering they face, because the prognosis is so negative and because they want to speed the dying process, should have the right to do so? Is it any longer critical for Canada to say that they cannot do that, that they cannot ask someone to assist them in doing it, and that if they do then the person who assists them will be liable for a criminal offence?
I believe our society has progressed to the level at which we can say that it is not a reprehensible act that should be punished by a criminal penalty and that we should respond in a caring and compassionate way to people like Sue Rodriguez, Nancy B. and the many other Canadians faced with the same tragedy who merely want the opportunity to end their pain and suffering.


Mr. Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood):: Mr. Speaker, I am rising in opposition to this motion. I do not think it is a progressive measure to enshrine into the law of this land a motion that supports euthanasia.
I want to begin by saying that I have deep respect for the member who sponsored this motion and for the member for Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing whom I just finished listening to. My opposition to this motion not only results from a personal experience but also from views that I have heard from many of my constituents.
I would like to begin by talking about a personal experience that has caused me to believe that this is not the right way to go. It was the spring of 1988 and I was returning from a holiday in Cuba. I came off the plane
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and my wife said to me: "Your father has been in the hospital for the last three days and you should go down and see him". I said: "Well, when you say it like that there must be something serious going on here". She said: "He is not well".
From the tone of her voice I knew that something was up and so I rushed right away to St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and I walked into the room. My father was a very young man, more like a brother than a father to me for most of our relationship. I said: "Well, Dad, what's up?" He said: "I have three months to live". He had lung cancer. After I asked him, in moments of frustration, if he had examined all the options-there are great doctors and great research in this country and in the United States-he said: "Listen, while you have been away I have gone through all of this. The prognosis is that I have 90 days, maximum 120".
After a couple of hours of real bitterness and frustration on my part I then went through an experience in which over the next 90 days I watched my father die. He moved from his home in the country, from the farm, into our home, into my own bedroom, for about 60 days before we moved him into the palliative care unit at St. Mike's. I believe that those days, not only for him but for me and many others around him, were very special moments even though we knew his life was coming to an end.
The first reaction by those of us who are not suffering is obviously one of care and compassion for the person. We do not want them to continue suffering, and naturally we do not want to be someone who is promoting that. That is not where I am coming from.
I believe that life, even in its most painful form and at its loneliest moment, is something precious and meaningful and not for us to make a judgment on as to when it should end, especially when the judgment is to be made by someone who in his or her natural state is low and in pain.
The last hours in the personal experience I had were very meaningful to my father who was in pain. Today we have lots of medication and support systems, but even those last hours were precious and meaningful. Had we co-operated in perhaps a moment of weakness on his part when he might have said he wanted his life to end today or next week, we would have denied him a joy that
Private Members' Business
he experienced right to the end. I certainly know we all experienced that joy.
I hear this from many other people who have had similar experiences. It is not that we do not have compassion for a person who is suffering. It is not that we do not care about a person who is suffering. Viktor Frankl is probably one of the best psychiatrists in the world. He developed a therapy called logotherapy where one can develop a meaning and a satisfaction at that most desperate moment in one's life. Somehow we should be putting more support, more time and more energies into that type of support system for a person who is facing the prognosis of death, of eternity.
For that reason, the reason being that life for me is precious and should be supported with all the forces and energies we have, we should not be the ones who support an interruption of it. For that reason I cannot support this bill.


Mr. Peter L. McCreath (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Industry, Science and Technology and Minister for International Trade):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to stand for a few minutes to offer some comments on this issue. I commend the hon. member for Port Moody-Coquitlam for bringing it before the House.
It is an issue about which Canadians will have to give an awful lot of thought over the next few months and indeed few years. I am sure my hon. friend in bringing the issue forward has done so because he has a great interest in justice issues as well as moral issues. This issue has been brought before the public recently by the Rodriguez case in British Columbia. That may or may not have stimulated my hon. friend to bring forward his motion, but I notice he spoke to that case in his remarks. We are also mindful of the case in Quebec a year ago.
The issue in my judgment is a very complicated one. There are a lot of issues, moral and otherwise, connected to it. Members will no doubt speak to that.
I am not sure in my own mind that there has been a lot of public discussion about this issue. When there is an emotional news story it captures public attention for a period of time and then goes away. Sometimes it leads to the kind of serious debate now before Parliament on this very controversial subject. Sometimes the story comes, goes, passes and is forgotten.


Private Members' Business
I would hope the Rodriguez case would stimulate the kind of serious discussion I feel we need on this issue in Canada. In a way it is a right to life issue, not dissimilar in the moral context to the issue of abortion and the issue of capital punishment. By contrast those issues have received perhaps too much discussion in this country. I know all members of Parliament have received representations on those subjects for many years.
I have to say honestly that I have not received calls from any of my constituents on this issue. It is not because my constituents do not feel strongly on the issue. It is because I think the issue has become the subject of very extensive and serious dialogue among Canadians.
This has to happen because it is an issue concerning changes in medical technology and our ability to keep people alive. Sometimes I think we have developed it almost to an industry of keeping people alive no matter how miserable they may be. As a nation we will have to face that issue just as it is being faced in other countries.
We are all mindful of what is going on at the present time in Holland and the legislative changes taking place there. With all due respect, Holland is not Canada. This is a moral issue about which Canadians will have to speak. I fully expect as on all moral issues that Canadians will be as divided on this one as they are on the issues of abortion and capital punishment.
However what is important is that we start to focus serious public attention on the issue, and that is where the motion by my hon. friend does a very important public service to Canada. Whether this motion is voted up or voted down, what is significant is that the issue has been brought before Parliament. For that I thank him and I commend him.
I do not know what my own position on it is. A lot of people will be motivated perhaps by their religious beliefs. The Bible is fairly explicit: Thou shall not kill. Of course the implication of this motion is to kill. Perhaps it is a mercy killing. Perhaps it is relieving somebody of misery from which there really is no end except through death. Indeed arguments can be made in that context.
As for myself I am not motivated totally by that concept so much as by the mere issue in my mind of whether it is appropriate for government in a democratic country to authorize citizens to kill each other. I know that is not put in the context meant by my hon. friend's motion, but that certainly is one interpretation.
What is the role of physicians in society? If we go back to the Hippocratic oath or whatever, is it to save life or is it to relieve pain? I am not a physician. I am not going to tell physicians what their perception of their role should be. I guess what I am saying is that it is premature for Parliament to speak on this issue. I honestly do not feel that there has been adequate debate in Canadian society on this issue. After that debate has taken place, perhaps a Canadian view will emerge that favours a move in the direction they are going in Holland. Perhaps Canadians will say no, that it does not reflect the value important to us as Canadians.
Each member of this House will have to decide ultimately where he or she stands. Most I assume would want to know what their constituents' feelings are with respect to the issue. Because somebody is for or against capital punishment or abortion would not automatically determine whether he or she is for or against establishing some legislative basis by which euthanasia should occur.
In summary I want to say it is important Parliament and government examine the issue and what the views of Canadians may or may not be on the subject. It would be premature for Parliament to vote in an overt direction of saying it is ready to commit Canada to a legislative basis for euthanasia. I do not think Canadians are ready for that decision to be taken.
I think it would be premature for Parliament to make that decision. Therefore I will be voting against the resolution though I do so with some reservation. Again, when I make that point I know my colleague from Port Moody-Coquitlam and my colleague from Fraser Valley East spoke very eloquently on this. A private member's bill has been brought before this House on the same subject. However, I think at this point it is premature. We need to give this issue more focus. The


day will come when Parliament will in a serious legislative way have to face this issue and make a decision.


Mr. Lyle Kristiansen (Kootenay West-Revelstoke):: Mr. Speaker, the motion before us of my colleague, the member for Port Moody-Coquitlam, is an important one. It is an issue which I am sure causes a great deal of anguish and personal difficulty to many members of the House.
Any subject that deals with personal, spiritual, religious and moral values is always a difficult issue to deal with in a public place and in a permanent way and Parliament is within the limits of any human act. It is one institution that is called upon to render those kinds of judgments.
It is important to recognize first of all the subject of this motion:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider
the advisability of introducing legislation on the subject of euthanasia
and, in particular, of ensuring that those assisting terminally ill
patients who wish to die not be subject to criminal liability.
It is important to recall that there are at least four members of Parliament from both sides of this House, the member for Port Moody-Coquitlam, the member for Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing, the member for Fraser Valley West, and the member for Burnaby-Kingsway, who have motions along these lines before this House. There may be other members.
It suggests to me and I would suspect to most other members that there is a feeling in our communities that Parliament should be asked to render a careful judgment on this issue in the not too distant future.
There is the case in British Columbia of Sue Rodriguez who suffers from ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and her struggle before the courts and on the cameras. It has brought to the attention of the Canadian people, from one end of the country to the other, the very agonizing choices people feel compelled to make.
In the speech of my colleague whose motion this is he pointed out: "People used to die at home mainly of communicable diseases. They received good palliative care from concerned family and friends. Now people die in hospitals surrounded by batteries of life-saving equipment. Seventy-five per cent of deaths are caused by chronic degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, AIDS, strokes and Alzheimer's disease".
Private Members' Business
The change in circumstances that paragraph outlines has taken place in the issue of life or death. People choose to continue to exercise their option and their choice for life has changed dramatically over the last number of years, even in the last very few years.
I know people in my area, and others from whom I have heard by letter and by phone, generally have indicated they feel that technology has changed to such an extent that some of the religious values that at one time were imposed and generally accepted now have to be called into question. The nature of life itself has changed because of our technology.
I suggest that people are asking us to act with care and flexibility. The courts are asking us to act and render a decision. Surely in light of the knowledge we have, our consciences must demand that we act. How we act is a different question. But if we move ahead with this motion and if it were to receive the support of this House, all that it asks us to do is to consider the advisability of introducing legislation on the subject of euthanasia. In particular this would be to ensure that those assisting terminally ill patients who wish to die would not be subject to criminal liability.
Surely, unless we feel a very strong religious compulsion to deny people the choice in any circumstances, we ought to be able to give our support to such a motion. It simply asks the government and, through the government, Parliament and all Canadians to seriously consider the many issues and come up with the most carefully designed legislation and guidelines that we can.
We are not an ecclesiastical court. If we were, we might be justified in saying no, but we are not. Therefore we must ask ourselves whether we have the right to deny a human being who, being of sound mind, determines that at a given point of artificially induced continuation of life they wish to terminate it rather than continue in a state of existence they find unbearable. I suggest the answer is no. We do not have the right to deny them that choice, a choice that only they should make.
If they have requested technical or medical assistance in exercising that free choice and that choice has been witnessed after a period of extensive personal and family counselling which we have a right to insist upon, then they ought to have that choice.


Private Members' Business
I am concerned, as I am sure many members are with the possible consequences of precipitate decisions taken by individuals but we can deal with that. I am also concerned by the potential misuse by third parties if we should begin on this road but we can deal with that. Speaking for myself, however, I have no right to impose my religious or spiritual values upon others of sound mind in the exercise of their judgment on what is surely the most important and most personal decision a person may feel compelled to make: the question of life or death.
In concluding my remarks I simply say again that it is an agonizing and moral choice, such as are the issues of capital punishment and abortion. However, we must remember that we are not an ecclesiastical court. We are the freely elected spokespersons of the Canadian body politic. They are concerned with this decision. They are concerned with its implications.
All that my colleague has asked in this motion is that the government address it without deadlines. Government should address it clearly and carefully, with the maximum of public input and consideration for all of those values we hold to be important.
I most sincerely urge all of my colleagues to give their support to this most important motion before us.


Mr. Maurice A. Dionne (Miramichi):: Mr. Speaker, I will probably find this somewhat difficult to express, but I must speak on this issue. It is a moral issue as far as I am concerned. It is not just an ordinary situation.
I suspect that most of us in this House have at one time or another had a loved one who suffered seriously in his or her dying weeks or months. That is very difficult to accept and it is very difficult to forget.
However, we were given no guarantees when we were bom, when we were conceived. We were not told that we were going to be happy all our lives or that we would suffer no pain. It seems to me that if we deviate from what I have studied and what I have learned with regard to life and its sanctity, then I cannot vote for a motion that would take a human life. To do so, to me, would be murder. To do so, to me, would be a betrayal of all of the things I have tried to stand for in my personal and public
lives. Therefore, if this motion comes before the House for a vote, I will naturally be voting against it.


Mr. Don Blenkarn (Mississauga South):: Mr. Speaker, I was not intending to rise today but I think it is important that we acknowledge the assistance the hon. member for Port Moody-Coquitlam has given us by bringing forward this motion. I have difficulty with the motion and I believe that most members in the House will have difficulty with the motion.
The whole question of euthanasia is something we are always faced with. It really is a question of whether, as a House, we are going to change the rules with respect to suicide and assisted suicide and where we would draw the lines. I suggest it is not a matter I am prepared to come out and be affirmative on at this stage. I believe my constituents would want to have a fair amount of opinion on the matter. One of the advantages of this debate is at least it brings it to the attention of the public.
I want to make a couple of comments. First, it has always been our law that a person is not entitled to take their own life. If that is the case, then they should not be entitled to have someone else take it for them. After all, life itself is sacred and the taking of life is itself a crime. The issue is whether the taking of life should be made not a crime under certain circumstances.
Surely it is as much a crime to take the life of someone who may be terminally ill as to take the life of someone who says: "I no longer wish to live in this world, will you assist me in killing myself?" Where do we draw the line between terminally ill because of disease or terminally in trouble because of a state of mind?
Where do we draw the line as to what is the real state of mind of someone who is terminally ill physically? Do they really want to end their life or do they only temporarily want to end their life as they go from one state of mind to another? Are they really suffering or are they in communion with God and with the hereafter, as we may want to put it? I do not know. We do not know. However, we have for a long time in our society provided that a person is not entitled to terminate their life and not entitled to have someone else terminate it for them.


We have all had members in our families who have been exceptionally ill. They have not known where they were and have clearly been in pain. It is so easy to pull the plug and kill them.
I do not think we have the right. We would certainly have to think very long and hard if we were to change the way our society has developed with respect to the right to life and the belief in life. Belief in life is a sacred and continuing thing.
I will be voting no on this motion today. I think it is important we discuss the matter but I do not think it is the time today for us to ask the government to legislate on euthanasia.


Mr. Phillip Edmonston (Chambly):: Mr. Speaker, I intend to use only a few minutes of my speaking time and leave the rest for my colleague, the mover of the motion.
I welcome this opportunity to support my colleague's motion, and I think there are three questions we should ask ourselves. First, do we need this kind of legislation? I think it is clear that we do. Just consider Sue Rodriguez and Nancy B. in Quebec, and so many other cases we have seen. At the very least we should consider the advisability of legislation on euthanasia for people who ask for assistance in bringing about their own death when their condition is such that they would rather die than go on living.
The second question: Is this proposal premature? I do not think so. We may not talk about this problem all the time, but it is nevertheless a very real problem in society today. It is the kind of problem that requires legislation or at least a discussion on its advisability. Gallup and other polls have shown that nearly 70 per cent of respondents agree there should be legislation on euthanasia. I do not think it is premature.
The third question, to which I think we must answer yes, is: Will there be a positive impact as a result of this legislation? The answer is a resounding yes, because if we look at the Netherlands which passed its own legislation, there has been no abuse whatsoever. What we want above all is to be able to get a medical decision and ensure that the last wishes of a patient who would rather die than go on living are respected.
Private Members' Business
Do we need this kind of legislation? The answer is yes. Is it premature? No. Will it have positive consequences? The answer is yes.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: I just wanted to point out that when the hon. member for Port Moody- Coquitlam is recognized, he will be exercising his right to reply and will be the last speaker on the motion. The hon. member has four minutes, until 11.52 a.m., when the proceedings on this motion are to expire.
The hon. member for Port Moody-Coquitlam. [English]


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, I will be brief. I want to say first of all that I am very proud of this House of Commons. This is the third hour of debate and the level has been superb. It has been thoughtful, passionate and relevant from all sides, no matter which of the two positions people have come down on. It has been a marvellous debate.
I just mention the hon. member for Don Valley West and my colleague, the hon. member for Okanagan- Shuswap, who made passionate speeches about their own personal life. We have heard very moving speeches, today from the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood, and the other day from the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
This issue belongs in Parliament. Two judges in the Supreme Court of British Columbia said that we should deal with it. We are dealing with it and this House has to have the courage to deal with it.
I think the vote this evening is only the beginning. No matter which way the vote goes, and I hope it will be a free vote and members will vote different ways, it is the beginning of Parliament facing this issue.
I crafted the motion delicately so that it would be open to the government to bring in legislation. There is a direction and it is a direction in the way that it was referenced to the Rodriguez case.
Parliament is dealing with it and I predict a future government will have to deal with it. If this government does not deal with it, eventually the people will expect Parliament to deal with it.
We cannot expect sick and dying people to be dragging themselves through the courts. Parliament has to deal with this issue. It belongs in Parliament. That is what we


Supply
are here for. We have to deal with these tough issues. We have got to do it.
I have had comments from my riding. I want to read a letter: "I am writing to you to thank you for the support you are giving Mrs. Rodriguez in her request to die. I have a prostate tumour which could put me in a position where I am not much use to anyone and suffer a great deal of pain. This is what happened to an older brother of mine. His was not an easy cross to bear".
These are real issues. These are family issues. Our families and our friends have had to deal with these issues. Medical technology allows people to hang on and on and they die in hospital surrounded by tubes and new equipment. People want to die with dignity. That is what the issue really is.
I want to quote Tom Harpur, writing in this weekend's The Toronto Star:
The truth is, Sue Rodriguez's fight to have doctor-assisted suicide made legal under certain specific, clear and out-in-the-open conditions is not just for her own sake but for the lives of all who may well one day find themselves in a similar situation. In any other field, those who endure loneliness, suffering and abuse for the sake of others are called heroes, heroines or saints. It's time we rallied behind her and recognized what this woman is really all about.
It is an issue for all of us. It is an issue we are going to have to deal with. It is an issue we are dealing with. It is a family issue. It is a life issue. It is the quality of life and the quality of death.
I will end the debate with a quote from Sue Rodriguez to this Parliament. She said:
Despite my losses, I do not want pity. All I ask of my fellow Canadians is understanding and compassion. Understanding that they too may some day be in a position similar to mine.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: It being 11.52 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 93, the time provided for debate has expired.
Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: All those in favour of the motion will please say yea.


Some hon. members:: Yea.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: All those opposed will please say nay.


Some hon. members:: Nay.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: In my opinion the nays have it.
And more than five members having risen:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: By unanimous consent, the recorded division is deferred until six o'clock p.m. later today.


[Stage Direction]
SUSPENSION OF SITTING
The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: It being 11.53 a.m., the sitting of the House is suspended until noon.
At 11.53 a.m. the sitting of the House was suspended.


SITTING RESUMED
[Stage Direction]
The House resumed at 12 p.m.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Today being the final allotted day for the supply period ending March 26, 1993, the House will proceed, as usual, to consideration of and concurrence in supply bills.

In view of recent practices, do hon. members agree that these bills be distributed now?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


Mr. Maurizio Bevilacqua (York North) moved:: That this House condemns the government for its policies that have stifled economic growth, destroyed Canadian jobs and exacerbated the recession.


He said: Mr. Speaker, today I want to talk about my hope for the future, my faith in the Canadian people and my desire to bring about change in this country. I want to speak about those Canadians who work hard, pay their bills, raise their families, help their communities, hope for a better future and are committed to Canada.
In the past four years I have travelled extensively throughout the country listening to the voices of the people. What I have heard is of great concern to me. Canadians are losing hope. Four years ago almost to the day I stood in this place to deliver my first speech as a member of Parliament. I spoke then about an agenda for change, an agenda that challenged this generation as previous dilemmas challenged our forefathers.
Four years ago I saw that agenda in the face of the single mother who with her children was compelled to stand outside the local food bank for their daily meal. I saw it in the apprehension felt by the factory worker who understood the personal threat imposed by Mulroney's insensitive free trade deal. I saw it in the inequity of Conservative budgets which have unfairly overburdened our working middle class families while rewarding the chosen few. I saw it in the attitude of our young graduates who despite their academic achievements still encountered a cold and indifferent world. I saw it in a country as rich as ours in people with no shelter, no food.
In 1993, four years later, there are more food banks than ever before. Workers are still waiting for adjustment programs and the promised job opportunities. The middle class is paying more taxes than ever before. Young people are faced with rising unemployment and there are more homeless people. We are living in very difficult times.
I could for the next while talk about the government's inability to reduce the public debt which now stands at $422 billion. It was $168 billion when the Conservative government took over. I could also speak at length about the inability of this government to address the deficit challenge, the human tragedy of over two million people on welfare, and 1.6 million people on the unemployment rolls. [DOT]
I could speak about the declining after-tax income of the average Canadian family, the 38 tax increases imposed since 1984. I could perhaps speak about the
Supply
325.000	manufacturing jobs we lost since 1989, the
206.000	bankruptcies we witnessed since 1990 and the one million Canadian children who live in poverty.
These are all very depressing statistics. However do not forget that this situation did not happen by accident. The Conservative government made some very basic and fundamental economic policy mistakes, among them fighting inflation at all costs, high real interest rates, a high Canadian dollar and a free trade agreement without adjustment programs.
Today I want to talk to you about something different.
I want to talk about how we can turn this country around.
As a Canadian born in the 1960s, a husband and father of two young children, I am much more concerned about the future than the past. It is for this reason I will concentrate my remarks on the future of this country and the Liberal Party's approach to deal with the future. There is no question a new approach is required.
A Liberal government understands that in the emerging global economy everything is mobile: capital, factories, even entire industries. The only resource that is really rooted in a nation and the ultimate source of wealth is its people. The only way Canada can compete is to have the best educated, best trained work force in the world, linked by the most advanced communication and technological infrastructure.
As a nation we cannot afford to have 30 per cent of our high school students drop out before completing high school, at a rate of 100,000 a year. That is one million in a decade. We have over 400,000 young people unemployed at a time when over 300,000 jobs go unfilled because we do not have people who possess the required skills.
In order to develop these skills we will work with the provinces, business and labour to establish a national apprenticeship program, provide tax incentives for on-the-job training and create a Canada youth service.
Our priority will be to focus on our country's resource, our people. That means investing in people and providing Canadians with a comprehensive adjustment strategy. Canadian workers who have been displaced by the forces of globalization are prepared to adjust and desperately want to. We are committed to helping them because we feel that government has a role to play where market forces fail. Our responsibility is to provide


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workers with opportunity, and in turn their responsibility is to make the most out of those opportunities.
Developing an effective adjustment program strategy is absolutely necessary as we attempt to develop a life-long learning culture that can easily adapt to change.
We must restore Canada's industrial capacity. Three hundred thousand jobs have been lost in recent months and those jobs are not coming back. We must create an environment to inspire confidence so that new jobs are created. Government must reward the people who work hard at creating new jobs, starting new businesses and investing in our people and plants. We must shift the focus from shrinking the economy to expanding the economy. That means jobs with futures in industries with futures.
The small and medium sized business sector, which creates most new jobs, is an integral part of our strategy. We will help small businesses with initiatives to assist them in bringing new products to markets, to speed up technology acquisition and to export to markets they have never before considered. In conjunction with the provincial governments, we will work toward reducing the regulatory burden which creates unnecessary problems for our small and medium sized enterprises.
We will also challenge Canada's major banks to give small business a break and to develop concrete measures to help small and medium sized businesses get the financing they need.
We would further reform the Small Businesses Loans Act and make it easier for small business to get equity financing. This will help small business and the economy to grow.
I fundamentally reject the solutions of yesterday. I favour policies which speak to the future. I believe in government activism, which means I reject the laissez-faire policies of the Conservative government. While I accept that government cannot do everything alone, it does have a role in fostering stable economic growth.
While we actively participate in the economy, we will commit ourselves to a strict and accountable set of fiscal guidelines. We need fiscally responsible government. If the debt escalates much further it will paralyse future governments.
We are committed to fiscal responsibility. We are committed to unwavering discipline in controlling federal expenditures. We are committed to holding off on new programs that do not contribute directly to the promotion of economic growth and jobs. We are committed to a reduction in the deficit both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the gross domestic product. We are committed to reducing the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product.
These commitments will move us in the right direction and will help us restore the confidence required in the international community. We must address the debt and deficit problem. It is a national priority.
As a party that has been a leader in the area of global trade we are committed to open and fair trade. The major focus of our trade policy is to secure and increase access to world markets while at the same time securing a better life for our people. Consequently our approach to the negotiation of future trade agreements must be one that deals effectively with human concerns like environmental standards, health and safety standards and working conditions.
The Tories have proven in two trade agreements that they cannot negotiate in Canada's interest. The NDP on the other hand refuses to accept the global reality.
We understand full well that one in five Canadian jobs is directly dependent on exports and we certainly want to be leaders in global trade. Our approach is distinctively different. We are deeply concerned about the development of regional trading blocs. If a North American trading bloc is emerging we recognize that Canada must play an active and independent role in defining that bloc.
We took the position that NAFTA negotiations be utilized to improve the terms of the FTA. Instead the NAFTA in the form agreed to by the government would completely scrap the working group on subsidies and dumping. In addition the government did not correct the energy giveaway in the FTA. The Conservatives have allowed Mexico protection for its energy resources that Canada itself does not have.
A Liberal government will seek changes to both the free trade agreement and the North American free trade agreement. We need a subsidy code, an anti-dumping code, a more effective dispute resolution mechanism, agreed upon labour standards, agreed upon environmental standards and the same energy protection as Mexico.


In addition, the Mulroney government has yet to introduce any adjustment assistance program to help Canadian workers and firms adapt to greater trade liberalization.
As well as improving the terms of NAFTA, Canada should be working with other countries in the western hemisphere to minimize dominance by larger and stronger trading partners. We would work to build common western hemisphere institutions to provide political, demographic and economic counterweights to the United States.
While we must seize opportunities to trade in the Americas, we would not turn our backs on the rest of the world. A Liberal government would work to expand trade in the Pacific basin and with the European Community. We support the Canada-Japan 2000 forum co-chaired by Peter Lougheed which has recently chartered a course for expanding trade with the Pacific basin.
Throughout its two terms in office, the Conservative government's economic agenda has been dominated by free trade. We recognize that trade policy is no substitute for sound domestic policy. Monetary, fiscal investment, training, education and research policies go hand in hand with trade policies. The Conservatives have failed to recognize this reality.
We need a fair tax system. No one can promise across the board tax cuts. That would be irresponsible. We can commit ourselves to tax fairness for every Canadian, especially to middle-class families who have borne the brunt of the tax increases since 1984.
The Conservatives have attacked us for our position on the GST. Here are the facts. The Conservatives have raised or imposed new taxes on individuals 38 times since 1984. The GST, the most hated tax in Canadian history, was imposed on Canadians without proper consultation. It was imposed on small business despite its opposition. It was imposed on the provinces over their objections.
The GST destroyed public confidence in the fairness of tax systems. It has expanded the underground economy. It has undermined consumer confidence, lengthening and deepening the recession. It is complex and costly
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for small business to administer and takes an army of bureaucrats to collect. It has made federal-provincial fiscal relations much more difficult.
We are left to clean up their mess. Unlike the Conservatives, who railroaded the GST through Parliament, we will implement a replacement in full consultation with individual Canadians, the business community and the provinces.
Unlike the New Democratic Party which thinks it can cancel the GST and have $15 billion fall from the sky, we acknowledge that the only responsible course is to replace the revenue brought in by the goods and services tax.
In the first session of a new Parliament, we will mandate the all-party Commons finance committee to consult Canadians and provincial governments on all the options to the current GST and report to Parliament within 12 months. Our objective is clear. We must find ways to generate equivalent revenues that are fair to consumers, easier to administer for small business and promote federal-provincial co-operation.
I think it is fitting that I started my remarks by talking about the future. I would like in my concluding remarks to speak about young people.
In the past four years, I have travelled throughout Canada listening to the voices of our young people. Instead of the unlimited future that my generation was fortunate to have, today's youth are confronted by diminishing opportunities. They are frustrated by an education system that cannot help the 100,000 high school students who lose hope and drop out every year. This is a system that fails to address the high illiteracy and innumeracy rates that afflict our youth. Young people worry about not having the skills needed to find jobs in tomorrow's knowledge-based economy and they cannot understand why the federal government will not provide them with opportunities.
Young Canadians are deeply troubled by this state of affairs. They are desperate for a new vision for Canada, a vision that will restore their hope and show them a future.

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The Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal team are determined to restore hope and offer a future to Canada's youth. We are determined to get our economy moving again, rebuild Canada's economic leadership, create highly skilled, highly paid jobs and reclaim our future for our children.
The Liberal team will create a society that will be able to compete globally, protect the environment and provide opportunities for its members. Young people are an important part of our vision. That is why the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal team are committed to giving them the tools they need to build the future and the new economy, an economy where young people will be full partners.
We call on all our economic partners, business, labour, all levels of government, communities and individuals to join us in a program to eradicate illiteracy and innumeracy among our youth. We call on them to help us promote co-operative education, to encourage work place training, and to help us develop national educational strategy goals.
The Liberal Party is committed to establishing a national apprenticeship training program and to creating a Canadian youth service dedicated to environmental protection and responding to the social needs of our community.
Like all Canadians, young people understand that the future is not a gift, it is an accomplishment. Together we know we can make a difference. Together we will make it happen. It is clear that we are ready to govern and bring about the type of positive change that Canadians are requesting.


Donald Alex Blenkarn: Mr. Speaker,
I listened with interest to the enormous program of the Liberal Party. It sounded to me like a rehash of some of the things we determined to do back in 1983 and 1984 and have accomplished.
I was wondering if the member could tell us so we could get it on the record for once whether or not his party is in favour of carrying on with the free trade agreement currently in place with the United States.
After he answers that, could he also tell us whether or not he will be voting in favour of a North American free trade agreement that may include Mexico and eventually
Chile, Argentina and Brazil? Does he want to have, in other words, a party addressed to world trade even if that trade is just North American trade? To what extent is his party a free trade party, or is his party a protectionist party?
Will he please tell us where he stands and where his party stands?


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Mississauga South for his question.
I can simply tell the hon. member that we stand on the side of Canadians, on the same side as all those workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector and are still waiting for this government to do the honourable thing, to introduce adjustment programs for those workers who have been displaced.
In a very short time this government has clearly indicated to Canadians that it does not stand on their side. We have been waiting for years for those programs to be implemented.
As for the question of-


Donald Alex Blenkarn: Answer yes or no.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: I see that the hon. member for Mississauga is getting quite excited about the speech which I delivered which clearly outlined the direction we are going.
Unlike the past, they were waiting for an opposition speech that was just going to oppose their policies. I tell them, and I do not think they are ready for this, that there is a new Liberal Party out there that is going to promote modem policies as I have done today.
On the issue of global trade, let us not kid ourselves. Something that is fundamental to Liberal economic policy is the fact that we are great believers in global trade. We will take all measures necessary to bring about the type of export trade and relationship between Canada and other western hemisphere countries whereby Canadians will have jobs for the 21st century.


Philip Edmonston: Mr. Speaker, I thought I had heard everything here in this House, but I must say a renaissance of the Liberal Party with the help of Camil Samson or Don Johnston stretches the imagination somewhat.


I had a meeting not long ago with the Quebec Food Retailers Association, and I would like to ask the hon. member a question about the tax on cigarettes in Canada.
Food retailers in Quebec are complaining that the excise tax on cigarettes in Canada is so high that it encourages smuggling. According to Quebec retailers, both levels of government-federal and provincial-should reduce taxes to make smuggling less profitable. They believe this would reduce crime in an area where the situation is comparable to what happened under prohibition in the United States.
Like my colleagues, I would appreciate a clear answer from the hon. member. If he wants a healthy economy and a low crime rate, would he approve of reducing taxes on cigarettes in order to fight crime linked to smuggling?


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, we as a party are reviewing the tax act simply because we have to look at modem day reform so that we can have a fair and more just tax system, unlike the one that the Conservative government has implemented.


Mr. Robert D. Nault (Kenora- Rainy River):: Mr. Speaker, this is a very important debate today because it gives us an opportunity to put the facts before the House as to just what is going on in this country.
The Conservative government and the members opposite seem to have this illusion that the country is doing really well. I want to put a couple of facts before the House today and then ask my colleague to respond as to what the Liberal Party's position is on this particular issue.
For example, business bankruptcies in Canada in 1990 were 11,642 and in Ontario they were 2,907. In 1991, business bankruptcies in Canada were 13,496 and in Ontario 3,629. In 1992, business bankruptcies in Canada increased to 14,317, and in Ontario they increased to 4,240.1 would suggest with the way things are going that in 1993 either there will be no businesses left to go bankrupt or there will be an increase to a record number in 1993 as well.
I would like to ask my colleague the following. One of the issues that the Tories like to talk about is that they are the party that represents the business community
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and in fact represents small business. I would like to know why it is that the Tory party and the government have not seen fit to help the small business community in this country, where we know jobs are created, to deal with these record numbers of bankruptcies and these record numbers of job losses. I would like to know if there is another way of approaching this which will be much more appropriate so that we can get the record number of people who are unemployed in this country under this particular regime back to work.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for his question. Fundamentally, there is a need for doing new things in this country and we must engage the small business community.
There is a whole new world out there in relation to technology, for example. We as a government will attempt and will succeed is speeding up technology acquisitions by small businesses so that they can modernize the various industries. We will help them achieve new exports in markets they have never considered before.
The relationship between small business and the Liberal Party has been an excellent one over the years. That is because we have always been not on the back of small business but on its side.


Lyle Stuart Kristiansen: Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity. I would like to ask my Liberal friend from York North a question.
He made a couple of comments relating to the team of the Leader of the Opposition. I think he called its commitment "the J.C. team's commitment to operate within certain guidelines or parameters". I hope his memory goes back to the early 1980s, about 1983. I am just wondering whether those economic parameters the Liberal Party is committed to are somewhere between zero and the 12 per cent inflation that we had then, between zero and the 24 per cent interest rates we had then, and between zero and the 13 per cent unemployment rate we had then. Are those the parameters the new Liberal Party commits itself to?


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, one thing I am going to do is tell the hon. member that we will in no way, shape or form imitate the provincial government in Ontario. It has created an unbelievable mess in the Ontario economy.


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We are committed to bringing a new economy to Canada. That is our commitment. We will do it with fiscal responsibility, with progressive programs and with the type of economic changes in institutions and in government that will bring prosperity back to Canadians.


Hon. John McDermid (Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Mr. Speaker, I am glad the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood is welcoming me this morning. I always enjoy seeing him sitting in the House heckling. I am sure he will do a fine job today as he usually does, along with his friend from Kenora-Rainy River. I am looking forward to participating in this debate.
I looked at this motion and could not believe it, even now after hearing that speech by my hon. friend from York North, who is a neighbour of mine in the political scene in Canada. He was talking about the new party. This fresh new Liberal Party is going to come here to Canada and save us from ourselves.
This fresh new party is led by an individual who was in the House of Commons when John Kennedy was president, when Harold Macmillan was prime minister of Great Britain and when de Gaulle was president of France. Instead of aftershave there is that faint smell of embalming fluid coming across from that side of the House. There is nothing new about that party, nothing at all.
My hon. friend talked about the tax system and how they are going to look at the tax system. I have news for him. This is his first term so he is probably not aware of what went on before or he has not studied it.
The last time the Liberals did that they appointed a royal commission on the economy. It was led by a very distinguished Canadian, a former parliamentarian, a Liberal cabinet minister by the name of the Hon. Donald Macdonald. He along with many fellow Canadians from all walks of life spent a number of years looking at the economy of this country and what had to be done. The report came out in late 1984. What did it recommend?


Dennis Joseph Mills: An adjustment program.


John Horton McDermid: It recommended a free trade agreement with the United States. It recommended a consumption tax. It recommended that we do away with the manufacturers' sales tax and have a consumption tax. It made other recommendations, including reducing the
number of categories in income tax. All these have been accomplished by the present government. They have all been accomplished.
The hon. member said there was no consultation on the goods and services tax. That was the blatant statement he made today. Again, he was not here during that period from 1984 to 1988. Immediately after the recommendations came out from the royal commission many hearings were held by the finance committee, by the government across this countiy.
In 1986 three options were presented to the Canadian government. Consultation took place until 1988 when the government made the decision before the election that there would be a goods and services tax. Believe it or not, we campaigned on it in 1988. We laid it out to the Canadian people and we campaigned on it. As I remember, we had a very good majority government in 1988 and so we implemented the goods and services tax.
I understand the hon. member's enthusiasm being new here and I applaud him. In his comments he said he was going to accomplish all those wonderful things: deficit reduction and at the same time we are going to increase foreign aid; we are going to increase help to small business; we are going to increase adjustment programs; we are going to increase this, we are going to increase that; and, by the way, on the GST we are going to have a parliamentary committee look at it for a year and then maybe we will come up with an answer as to what we are going to do. If the parliamentary committee's recommendation were to keep it as it is, would they keep it as it is?
Would they keep it as it is if that was the recommendation? No answers. Let the record show there are no answers coming from over there, none whatsoever. Read that speech this morning. It is just wonderful platitudes.
I understand the depression coming from over there. There is a reek of fear from the benches across the floor because they are watching their political prospects fade as Canada's economy gets stronger which is to the real benefit of Canadians. That is why they are worried over there. They are also worried when the Conservatives come in with a new leader that they are going to be wiped clean. That is another thing to worry about, but we are not going to talk about that today because that is not included in the motion.


I heard the hon. member talk about a flawed free trade agreement and how terrible it is. They have seen Canadian exports reach a new record in January of $14.6 billion. We achieved the largest monthly merchandise trade surplus since March 1985. Last week Statistics Canada reported that employment rose in February, the ninth gain in the last 10 months. There are 156,000 more Canadians with jobs today than there were last August.
They do not like this kind of news. They sit over there yelling and screaming. They do not like good news. They want to keep everybody depressed in this country. They want to keep them down for their political advantage. They want everybody really feeling badly about themselves.
This morning I thought we were at a funeral listening to his speech. This did not sound like a brave new political party. It sounded like somebody moaning and groaning because he knows full well that his seat is in bad shape right now. It is in jeopardy and he knows it.
We are holding inflation at the lowest sustained level in decades. That is an achievement Canadians are taking to the bank.


Dennis Joseph Mills: You will not win a single seat in metro.


John Horton McDermid: The hon. member for Broadview- Greenwood must have got up late this morning and did not read the latest Angus Reid poll. I am sorry. He must have missed that quite conveniently somehow on the weekend. He must have been up at his farm riding his horses or something all weekend and missed it.


An hon. member:: That is why they are so edgy.


John Horton McDermid: The interest rate on a one-year conventional mortgage is back down to 7.25 per cent. That is half of what it was a couple of years ago. On a standard $100,000 mortgage that translates into a monthly saving of $480 or $5,700 a year. That is good news for Canadians. It is more disposable income in their pockets.
The other thing I am finding that Canadians are doing about that is they are making the same payments and paying down their mortgages much quicker. One family told me that with the change in the interest rates it is
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knocking five years off the length of time to pay their mortgage.
This is a distorted motion. It implies that the opposition members could advance policy alternatives that could have stopped a global recession that affected Canada. However they rarely specify these alternatives.
This morning there were no alternatives. They were all platitudes. It was all wishy-washy stuff. Anybody could stand up and say that. The hon. member did not say how he was going to do all these things. "We are going to help small business. We are going to help small business obtain technology". How? Through grants? Through loans? How are we going to do that? Tell us how we are going to do that. He does not know.
The policy agenda the Liberals have to offer is a matter of record. We just have to remember the seventies and early eighties.
I just picked up the red tide, The Toronto Star. The Liberal power in the city of Toronto is this great paper, The Toronto Star. Beland Honderich, when I spoke to him, did not shy away from that. He said: "I am Liberal and proud to be and I will keep pushing the Liberals as long as I can". Here is a great article: "Seeds of Disaster Planted in 1975". We know the fiscal record of the Liberals. The people know it too and they do not want them back.
Here is what the Liberals do. We heard it today.


An hon. member:: Polls are for dogs.


John Horton McDermid: Oh thank you, John Diefenbaker, that was very good. Now the Liberals are quoting John Diefenbaker. I just heard the hon. member quote John Diefenbaker. That is great.
There are the Liberals and we heard it today. They believe that when the country has a problem they borrow more money. Their philosophy is: Do not worry about higher taxes tomorrow; just spend your way through the problems today and the hell with tomorrow. We had to pick up tomorrow and we know that tomorrow has to be thought of all the time. The leopard has not changed its spots. The Liberal leader and his mouthpiece today talked about deficit and debt control but did not dare identify a target.


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The most he would say is that he would cut the deficit as a share of the gross domestic product. We have done that by half. Since we came in we have cut the deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product by a half. How much will they cut it? Will it be a dollar, will it be 0.0001 per cent of the GDP? They are just not saying.
At least that other party over there, the New Democratic Party, as part of its pie in the sky program claims that it can cut the deficit by billions in five years. Nobody believes it, but that is what it says it can do.
Nobody in Canada nor in this government created the underlying problems that made Canada so vulnerable to a recession. What we have done is put in place solutions based on years of tough decisions and consistent effort to position Canada for growth in the 1990s and into the 21st century. If we want to see this growth continue and accelerate we must stick to the policies that are clearly proving their worth. These are policies that are reflected in the forecast by the OECD, representing 24 of the world's major industrial nations, that Canada will see the best growth of any G-7 country this year and next.
That is better than the U.S.


An hon. member:: Wow.


John Horton McDermid: The hon. member sits there and says: "Wow". It is better than Japan, Germany, France, the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom. That is pretty damned good with the economic situation we have now. But oh, no. My hon. friend goes around moaning and groaning, with his face hanging down, about how terrible things are in this country.
The hon. member says that things are so bad and if we just elect the leader of the Liberal Party we will get out of it. That is all we have to do. I am going to say that his record as finance minister, his record on the Treasury benches, is one of the worst this country has ever seen. I am not sure he has the credentials to even lead a party, let alone be the Prime Minister of this country. That is for sure.
Let me remind the House of some of the economic realities we faced and the steps we had to take to repair the economic damage done by the previous government
to set Canada on the path to sustainable economic growth and job creation.
The hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood would like to see me resign. He would like to see me resign because I am such a threat to them.
There was a TV show once about the opposition called Fantasy Island. The rest of Canada lives in a world economy marked by two overriding economic realities: constantly increasing competition and growing national interdependence. No company or country can count on safe markets or secure customers.
The big breeze from Kingston just blew in. By golly the roads must be clear between Kingston and Ottawa. Look who has just arrived. The hon. member from Kingston just got here from-


Mr. Milliken:: From committee.


John Horton McDermid: -committee. It is nice to see him up and around at this time of the day.
As well, no country is immune from global currents. We are all linked in a world-wide web of financial markets, shared economies and trade partnerships. This is particularly true for Canada because trade is our bread and butter. It supports one in four Canadian jobs. Yet both opposition parties have opposed the free trade agreement. They are talking about opposing NAFTA. Maybe they will not, maybe they will vote for NAFTA. Maybe they will support NAFTA yet. I should not jump to conclusions too fast.
Few of the major industrial economies are doing well. We are currently performing better than most, given that we saw fourth quarter growth of 3.5 per cent on an annual basis at a time when the German and British economies were shrinking and those of France and Italy were flat. Japan is expected to only grow by somewhere between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent this year. The fact is that there is no way Canada can isolate itself from the consequences of global economic weakness. There is no way that our workers and companies can succeed and grow unless we become more competitive and more productive.


There was an interesting article in The Globe and Mail. In the "Money Matters and Amazing Facts" section the headline read: "Factories making more with fewer people". The article continued: "Companies that survived the recession did so mainly because they invested heavily in new machinery and equipment that would let them produce more with fewer people. As a result, factory output has increased by about 7 per cent in the past year even though the number of jobs is up by less than 1 per cent. And although the pace of job creation in manufacturing has picked up steam in recent months the trend to higher productivity is likely to continue for some time yet and always does".


Maurizio Bevilacqua: A jobless recovery.


John Horton McDermid: My hon. friend says it is a jobless recovery. What he should be saying is that we have become more productive and therefore we can sell more in the world today. In selling more we are going to increase business and that will create employment. He must understand that is what follows. It has to follow. He does not understand that but it has to follow.
The hon. member must also understand that in every industrialized country in the world manufacturing jobs have decreased. Does the member deny that? Does the member deny that in the major industrialized countries in the world manufacturing jobs are disappearing? Does the member agree with that or not? He does not know. He does not know. He does not have a clue.
We remember when the Liberals were in power and spending $1.33 on programs for every dollar of tax revenue they brought in. We had to turn that around. We now have a surplus on our operating budget. It was tough to do and it is going to continue to be tough.
The Liberals are living in a dream world if they think they can cany on and not worry about deficits and debts.


Dennis Joseph Mills: He said it in his speech. We talked about it.


John Horton McDermid: He did. At the same time he talked about how many programs he was going to increase spending for but would not say where the money was coming from. He was going to cut taxes for the middle class. He was going to give more to small business. He was going to give more to foreign aid. He was going to do
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all these things and reduce the deficit. That is wonderful. We will be very interested in seeing this great smoke and mirrors achievement.
They can say all these things now very easily because they are in opposition and they are not going to be over here to implement them. All I can say is: Thank God for that.
He was talking about the GST today. He was saying that he was going to change the GST. They are not sure how they are going to change it, when they are going to change it and what it might be. They talk about maybe a hidden tax that will cover everything. That will be the GST two, the Grit's sneaky tax. That is what that stands for.
We took a lot of flak over implementing the GST. However, it was the right decision, our growing exports proved that point. The GST has reduced-


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Rubbish.


John Horton McDermid: Here is the expert from Kingston. A great businessman, he understands all this very well. The GST has reduced the cost of capital investment for firms by about 4 per cent. The Canadian Manufacturers' Association has estimated that by eliminating the federal sales tax manufacturers improved their competitive position by $3.5 billion in one year. These are not the government's figures, my figures, the finance minister's figures or the Prime Minister's figures but the Canadian Manufacturers' Association's figures.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: All at the expense of the consumer.


John Horton McDermid: Nonsense, absolute nonsense. In the 1992 budget we reduced personal and corporate income taxes and improved the capital cost allowance for manufacturing and processing firms.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Tory times are tough times.


John Horton McDermid: Here we go. Here is the old cry. The opposition is in bad shape today. It is in terrible shape, not only in terms of ideas but politically. The Liberals know it. This week we heard their own leader talk about cry-babies and nervous nellies. He said: "Come on guys, buckle up. Come on, get behind me because I am a little


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nervous now too and I need all the propping up I can get".
We have taken some very tough decisions over the last nine years. They have not all been politically popular but they were revolutionary. It is beginning to be proven that we made the right decisions. Canada is going to come out of the recession that we have experienced over the last couple of years with flying colours. The Canadian people understand the fiscal situation and will be prepared to reward the Progressive Conservatives with another majority government this year. There is no doubt about it.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I want to be constructive in my remarks to the member.
In mid-December the Minister of Finance made an economic statement. He put forward an idea called amendments to the Small Businesses Loans Act. In his remarks the Minister of Finance made mention of the fact that the greatest hope for new job creation in this countiy lies with small business. We on this side of the House support that position.
When the piece of legislation, Bill C-99, came to this House we co-operated in committee and we co-operated in the House to put this bill through the House because we feel that the 960,000 small businesses eligible under this piece of legislation should be supported and should be encouraged.
With the previous initiative, the prosperity initiative, after second reading the government spent millions and millions of dollars promoting it, promoting the "we can do it" campaign.
This piece of legislation will go through all readings in the House of Commons. It is receiving royal assent today or tomorrow from the Senate. The government knows the bill is going through; it controls the Senate. If it is so committed to small business then why will it not communicate it to the people of Canada, to the small business people of Canada, the people who are thinking of going into business, the people who will create the jobs, who will end up moving from welfare rolls to job creation and paying taxes? Why will it not get behind its own legislation? In the last two weeks I have heard about no less than 20-odd small businesses that have gone to the Bank
of Montreal, the Royal Bank, the CIBC and the list goes on. To this day everybody is saying: "We do not know about it".
I promoted this bill and I have been constructive on this bill. However the government is not communicating it and it is thereby frustrating its own efforts to put people back to work.
I ask the minister in a constructive way: Why will his government not communicate to the people of Canada that this piece of legislation exists?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, we will. There is no question about it, but comparing it with the "yes we can" campaign is kind of like comparing apples and oranges. There is no legislation dealing with the "yes we can" campaign. I am glad the hon. member supports that piece of work because I thought it was very good to highlight two Canadian companies that have done well. The hon. member knows full well, and I think he will agree with me, that every time we pick up the paper it says: "We have not been able to compete" or mentions that another company had closed or whatever.
We were trying to say to Canadians: "Don't get down. We have great companies in this country and, yes, we can," and instil some pride. A lot of those "yes we can" companies were small businesses.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Small Businesses Loans Act.


John Horton McDermid: The member had his little five-minute say. Let me answer the question in my own way, if I might. I did not interrupt him. Maybe he would give me the same courtesy.


Dennis Joseph Mills: He interrupted incessantly during my speech.


John Horton McDermid: He did with me too, so let us call it even. The "yes we can" program was a very successful program that was well received by the public, there is no question. However there was no legislation involved in it. We will promote it once this legislation is through and the minister of small businesses has met with the banks and has their assurance that they will work with the program. I think the banks want to see the legislation through before they start promoting it. It receives royal assent today or tomorrow, as the hon. member has pointed out, and we will be doing what is necessary to promote it because it is a very important piece of legislation.


We do not bring legislation to this House and then put it on the shelf and forget about it. The hon. member knows that. He is trying to make an issue out of something that really is not fair at all. Once the bill is passed, our government will do what is necessary. If we brought out brochures and information packages, et cetera, before this bill was passed the hon. member, his leader and the rest of them would be up on their feet moaning and groaning about being out ahead of a bill. How can we promote this stuff before the bill is passed?
It is a weak argument.


Philip Edmonston: Mr. Speaker, I have the feeling I am in a love-in between the other two parties. If I may perhaps have your attention.
I would just like to ask a question of my colleague. I followed what he said with a great deal of interest and many of the things he said were pretty factual.
What I would like to ask him concerns a problem I am having with this whole question of free trade. Small businesses that have contacted me are very much concerned about the new free trade agreement that we may have with Mexico and the United States. Some of the small business people have told me that they have already had their business negatively affected by free trade with the United States. I see the Conservative tradition being established by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence saying he is against the helicopters while the Minister of National Defence says she is in favour of the purchase of the helicopters. Perhaps the minister could respond in a very objective manner, even if it does not go along with the party's policy and the general response given on free trade. It is the following question.
Inasmuch as certain businesses are going to be affected, negatively I am sure, and the American government has asked that there be certain ironclad, parallel agreements before going further, does the minister not think it would be prudent for Canada, before we go any further with NAFTA, to seek similar types of guarantees-I am talking about environment, working conditions and so forth-and do that at this stage as the United States is doing?
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There are two reasons. First, in a substantive sense it would help us be more protective of our own jobs. Second, in a symbolic sense it might show that we are demanding certain concessions from Mexico that the U.S. is demanding from Mexico. We are doing this in a united way. I am not talking about government policy or government response. In free trade, would it not be more prudent to wait for those parallel agreements to come about before we go further?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, the short answer is no. I will expand on that if I might.
We requested accords much like those being debated now a year ago February. That is on record. There is no question about that. At that time the administration of the United States turned it down.
In a speech some time in October the then candidate for the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, stated that he would like some side agreements on the environment, on labour and on what we call snap-back or provisions that would protect sudden surges from countries into their marketplace of certain products. We had no problem with that and we are at the table with them as an equal partner. The three countries are negotiating these things.
At the same time, the NAFTA is not going to be changed. That was reinforced again by the President and by the negotiator just in the last week. They are not going to change the NAFTA. These are separate agreements that are being negotiated. As a matter of fact, the one on the environment and so on is one that we had promoted for over a year. We feel very comfortable in sitting down and negotiating these with our two partners in the NAFTA.
Each legislative body in Mexico, the United States and Canada has started to examine the NAFTA. It has not been put on hold in any one of the jurisdictions, including the United States. That procedure is going on. We are saying that while these side agreements are going on, which will not affect the NAFTA one iota-it is not going to be amended-the procedure will take place because all three countries are committed to implementing it on January 1, 1994. Again that was reiterated by the-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Order. Resuming debate.


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Mr. Ron Fisher (Saskatoon-Dundurn):: Mr. Speaker, the member for Chambly and I are splitting the time.
I am pleased to be involved in the debate today on the opposition day's motion which says:
That this House condemns the government for its policies that have
stifled economic growth, destroyed Canadian jobs and exacerbated
the recession.
It probably should have read depression, but it is a good start. It certainly is descriptive of the problem we find ourselves facing.
I would like to address some of the things brought in by this government which my party and I consider to have been so devastating: the free trade agreement, the proposed North American free trade agreement, deregulation, privatization and changes to unemployment insurance, not one devastating change but at least two of them. I should mention the off-loading on to the provinces. I will not go into all the ramifications of that, as well as the GST.
Certainly there have been clawbacks. I do not suppose there will be time to go into those in any great depth but there were the clawbacks of the seniors' pensions and the changes to family allowances for children just in case I do not get back to that topic. It certainly has crossed my mind to wonder why the government has to try to correct Canada's economic problems-and we will get to the source of those as well in a moment-on the backs of children and seniors.
I think I heard the Minister of State for Finance and Privatization say that for the most part what the government did was implement many of the proposals in the Macdonald royal commission which was set up originally by the Liberals. He was berating the Liberals for not having taken cognizance of what the commission that they themselves set up proposed for the country.
I would like to point out that in the context of the Macdonald royal commission, the then national director of the United Steel Workers of America was the co-chair and the director of the union to which I still belong and with which I was involved for quite some time, issued a minority report on that commission. I think that is important.
I also believe that I heard the Minister of State for Finance and Privatization quote an article from what he
referred to as the "red paper". I think that is The Toronto Star. Being from the hinterland of Saskatchewan I am not too familiar with the eastern newspapers. The Toronto Star said that the seeds of disaster which confront Canada originated in 1975.1 certainly would concur with that because of course the problems facing this country started under the Liberals and as the Minister of State for Finance and Privatization has admitted, continued under the Liberal-sponsored royal commission into their administration.
They do seem to have a certain affinity for each other. I noticed just a while ago we had a Question Period which I think could be described as a truce. Certainly the amount of heckling that went back and forth between those two parties subsided considerably. I think that was out of respect for each other's potential embarrassment if they got into too deep a discussion of any of the issues.
In the province of Saskatchewan since the free trade agreement came in-I will not go into all of these-in the goods producing industries there has been a decrease of 17 per cent in the jobs available; in the mining, quarrying and oil industry a decrease of 17 per cent; in manufacturing it has been 16.5 per cent; in durable goods there has been a decrease of 27 per cent; in the production of beverages-this goes into the aspect of how interprovincially the free trade agreement has affected trade within Canada-the decrease has been 36 per cent and in building, development and general contracting there has been a reduction of almost 40 per cent. The list goes on and on.
I would like to point out that the government spent millions of dollars in media advertising trying to convince Canadians that the free trade agreement was so good. It spent almost $2 million on radio commercials and almost $1.5 million on a brochure which it sent to every household in the country. The tabloid told us that free trade had boosted exports, created jobs and helped cushion the recession. What it did not tell us was that an additional 600,000 Canadians had joined the official unemployment rolls since January 1989 and that the unemployment rate had risen from 7.6 per cent to 11 per cent or 1.6 million in total. In Saskatchewan the unemployment rate since free trade came in has gone from 7.4 per cent to 9.1 per cent. The tabloid did not tell us that bankruptcies had increased as much as they had.


The tabloid asked us to consider the growth statistics from 1981 to 1991. Furniture was up by 28 per cent, textiles were up by 89 per cent and plastics were up by 16 per cent. What it did not tell us was that in the textile sector almost 22 per cent of the jobs had been lost; an increase in unemployment in that sector of almost 13,000 jobs. The plastic sector had a loss of 22,000 jobs. What it did not tell us also was that there had been a drop of 11 per cent in production in the auto parts industry. In addition to the 30,000 jobs lost in the machinery producing industry, there had been a drop of 20 per cent in production.
The pamphlet also pointed out, and it was well worth remembering, that every billion dollars worth of exports creates 15,000 jobs. In the period between 1989 to 1991 it said Canadian exports grew by almost 11 per cent. It is talking dollars, but what it did not tell us is that if we take into account inflation and a change in the value of the Canadian dollar, our exports increased not by 11 per cent, but increased only two-thirds of 1 per cent. At the same time and under the same criteria the imports into the United States from Canada increased by 2.9 per cent.
It is important that one defines the terms in which one is speaking. Inflation and the value of the Canadian dollar made all the difference and the amount of increase was simply insignificant.
There is not going to be time to talk about the devastation the government has caused through changes to UI. It is obvious that whether we are talking in terms of the Liberals or the Conservatives, the devastation to the nation has been the same and both have contributed to it, perhaps not equally, but they certainly share the responsibility for having taken Canada into the depths it is in.
I was interested the other day when the member for South Shore was berating the critics of the North American free trade agreement. He said that we had to stop hiding behind this high wage wall. I do not think we have to stop criticizing the free trade agreement. We have to criticize it as strongly as we can for the simple reason that it is not a matter of Canada hiding behind a high wage wall. If we look at our competitors, those who
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I think can be genuinely called our competitors, or most of the European countries, they have significantly higher wage rates than we do, even with the United States dollar being the standard against which we measure them.
Many of our competitors have higher wage rates than we do. It is unconscionable for someone in the government to say that we have to stop hiding behind high wage rates, implying that what we are supposedly as Canadians willing to do is take lower wages. I cannot imagine for what reason.
I see my time has expired, Mr. Speaker. I assumed there was going to be enough time to address all the issues. I thank the House for the time that I have had.


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond briefly and ask a question of my hon. friend.
I am flabbergasted. In the last two years we have had more snow in the maritimes than we have had for 20 years. I cannot believe my hon. friend did not blame that on the free trade agreement too because it seems he has blamed everything else on it.
It is interesting. He says that increases in unemployment have occurred since the free trade agreement came in. Timing-wise he is right. We, along with the rest of the world, have been through a major recession. If there are no barriers around Canada then my hon. friend is not seeing through the invisible whatever is there.
Interesting. Let me just read him a quote or two. I know he will not take my word for it because for some reason he is a bit suspicious of what I might say. Listen to this one. "Far from creating the recession the FTA has softened its effect. The recession has been global and coincided with a fundamental restructuring of the world's economy. Critics too often attribute the effects of both recession and restructuring to the demon FTA, when without the FTA and those increased exports Canada's recession would have only been far worse and restructuring more difficult".
What lofty source do we have here? Would you believe it is The Toronto Star? That is what The Toronto Star said.


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Then this one: "Free trade critics are confusing the facts. They are blaming the FTA for job losses that are attributable to a variety of other economic circumstances, such as the recession. There is also evidence that the FTA rather than hurting the economy may have actually offset some of the damage that the recession has done to the Canadian economy today". That is from the Conference Board of Canada.
Here is another one: "The perception in some quarters that the FTA has had a negative impact on the economy is not supported by the evidence. Canada's access to the U.S. market has improved since the agreement with 15 of 22 Canadian industry sectors gaining market shares. Canada's exports to the United States have reached record highs and net foreign direct investment inflows turned positive in 1990 and 1991 after nearly two decades of net outflows. Canada has already benefited from the FTA in a number of ways".
That one is from the Royal Bank of Canada. I could go on, but I will simply conclude by asking my hon. friend, if he is correct and the FTA is the source of all these problems, to explain to me why they have had a recession in Germany, Japan, France, the United States and every other industrialized country in the world?


Ron Fisher: Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the hon. member's question. I am still completely puzzled by his statement the other day in the House directed toward critics of the free trade agreement that we had to stop hiding behind a high wage wall.
I have the figures here somewhere. If we look at the European economies they range from a high for total compensation, wages and benefits, I believe Norway is on the top with Germany and the Scandinavian countries coming just slightly below, of somewhere around $24. Canada, out of 13 countries, comes in eleventh.
I do not hear the member from South Shore and I do not hear anyone from the government suggesting that the European countries which certainly are competitors ought to be lowering their compensation rates for wages and fringes to their employees. I have the impression that they are doing very, very well, thank you, as far as their economy is concerned. The German mark has almost supplanted the American dollar as being the standard by which progress is made.


John Horton McDermid: Boy, are you behind.


Ron Fisher: Well, perhaps, but if you want to use the American as the standard, the world's greatest debtor nation, I suspect that there really is not much efficacy in doing that. The United States is hardly something to look upon.
I am rather curious about the member quoting the Conference Board of Canada. I could be wrong, but was the Conference Board of Canada not one of the boards that the government dismantled in the mini budget in December?


An hon. member:: No.


Ron Fisher: No? Well, it is slated. The only reason the government has not got rid of it then is that it is a private body. Any other bearer of bad news, it certainly does a good job of eliminating. I find it appalling that the member would stand up and try to defend the government's abysmal record.


Philip Edmonston: Mr. Speaker, I came here and I listened to what I know is the opposition motion today which essentially says that the government, the Conservatives, are responsible for the economic mess that we find ourselves in. I do not buy that. I do not think it is true. I do not think it is right what the Liberals say in their motion today, that all of our problems economically, the recession and everything else can be laid at the door of the Conservatives.
A lot of things can be laid at the door of the Conservatives. I do not particularly like the idea to purchase helicopters for $5.8 billion. I think it is wrong. I think it is a wrong idea. The parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence thinks it is a wrong idea. I think it is time for us to look at a little bit of sharing the blame because we have to admit that when the Conservatives came to power, they were saddled with a pretty heavy deficit.
We have to admit that when Bob Rae came to power in Ontario the Liberals did it to him. They left him with the cupboard bare. You have to admit that when Mr. Romanow-and I cannot blame this on the Liberals- came into power for the NDP in Saskatchewan the Conservatives did to him what the Liberals had done to Bob Rae.


Let us discuss things, if we are going to discuss things in this House of Commons, along factual lines. We are all to blame for spending getting out of control. It is out of control still when we look at the helicopter purchase. It is out of control still when we look at the federal deficit, which is almost $500 billion.
When we talk about free trade it is almost like the weather because it is there, it has been voted and we have it. If it is raining or if it is shining, one side or the other always tries to blame the other for that particular meteorological phenomenon.
If it is raining, if we are losing money, it is free trade. If it is shining you can be sure that if the economy has a little blip where it goes up, the Conservatives are going to say: "You see how good a deal our free trade arrangement was".
I do not think Canadians are buying this argument. I do not think Canadians watching the motion being debated today are particularly happy to see the bantering back and forth where the Liberals are saying you guys are incompetent and the Conservatives are saying you Liberals are incompetent. The message it sends to the people who elected us is that both political parties are incompetent. They are the ones who have managed the public purse for the past some 30 years where most people remember the economy just going into the pits.
Think of the message that we are sending to the people who have elected us. The Liberals are calling the Conservatives no good, the Conservatives are calling the Liberals even worse. What is the solution?


An hon. member:: Vote NDP.


Philip Edmonston: No, I am not necessarily saying vote NDP. I think you have to look at the facts. There is something which must come out and it is this. There are three provincial NDP governments, that is true. Those governments have been hit by the cupboard being bare, by what I would call disingenuous rhetoric from the other parties saying: "Oh well, the cupboard is bare, we did not say it during the election but that is what happened. You are the new government. Do something with it".
I am going to ask the Canadian people to do this. Look at how well our governments are going to do provincially.
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I think they are going to do very well even though they have been asked to run a marathon with what I would call lead Reeboks because the recession and the overspending of the governments provincially have given a good opportunity for the NDP to show what it can do as a good government.
I think things will work out in Saskatchewan. They will work out in Ontario and I think they will work out in British Colombia.
It shows that contrary to what most people believe when they think of the Conservatives as excellent money managers or the Liberals as almost as good money managers, they are the chief architects of the terrible situation of unemployment we find, of the number of people on welfare and of the bankruptcies. They are the chief architects of this situation that we find ourselves in right now.
I do not think any one particular party has a monopoly on the culpability for what has happened. We are all responsible, but our party, the NDP, has a unique chance to prove what it can do when the going gets rough. I think we are going to do that. As we go on, probably in the next year or so, particularly with what is going on in the United States, the economic climate is going to improve somewhat. We are going to be able to have a chance to do the best with what we get, and I think we are going to be getting a better economy.
When we are talking about the situation as it is right now, and what we can do to improve it, the obvious thing is to cut spending. That means thinking the unthinkable. It means looking at universality closely. It means shifting and refocusing money perhaps from one sector, senior citizens, to another sector, youth. Those are hard decisions. We are going to have to look at bilingualism and how much we are paying for it. We are going to have to think the unthinkable, not along party lines but along common sense lines.
While we are talking about the Triple E Senate; equal, elected and-I am trying to think of the other E.


An hon. member:: Efficient.


Philip Edmonston: I am sorry. Efficient, yes. Efficiency was forgotten a long time ago. However we should look more closely at a Triple E government in which we concentrate on education, the environment and, above all, the economy. That is the Triple E that we have to concentrate upon. So stop blaming each other and let us


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get down to work, because if we want the people behind us, if we want them to elect us or support us, we had better speak their language. This morning we did not speak their language.


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I just have a brief question.
I was very interested in the hon. member's comments and I agree with him. That is what our government has been trying to do. We have been trying to take a look at the economy to see where we can streamline and cut back on our spending and so on.
Do the hon. member's colleagues within his party agree whole-heartedly with what he suggested we do today, such as looking at universality and some of the other issues? Do they support that?


Philip Edmonston: Mr. Speaker, not only members of my party but also those in the provincial governments support that position. If we look at their actions right now we will see them coming to grips with the reality of not having the money to spend that we have had in the past. It means that we have to take a hard look at universality. It means we will have to take a hard look at what is theory and what is reality, what are resolutions, and what has been past policy and try to put that in terms of today's reality.
There is a revolution going on. It is a revolution in thought. It is a revolution not along party lines on ideological lines but a revolution in which people are now asking not what is good for them but how much it will cost. That is an essential key to getting the public's confidence. How much will it cost? Can it be done efficiently? Is it practical? If we start thinking along those lines, no matter if we are Liberal, NDP or Conservative, we will have no trouble getting the public's vote.
Mr. Peter L. McCreath (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Industry, Science Technology and Minister for International Trade: Mr. Speaker, I am tempted to ask my hon. friend, as he talked about controlling expenditures, if he would explain why the NDP government in Ontario increased its spending by 13 per cent last year.
The member raised the subject of EH-lOls and says that the helicopter contract should be cancelled. I have
been a little bit confused by statements coming from his party about this because on the one hand his leader says the NDP wants to create jobs and yet the EH-101 contract will create 45,000 person-years of employment, and these are high-tech, good and valuable jobs that will position us well for future contracts.
The member's leader says that we need to have air-sea rescue helicopters. What on earth does she think the EH-lOls are? When the minister of defence increased that order a year or so back from 25 to 50 it was so that the best helicopters in the world would be available to provide search and rescue for our fishermen and other seamen, so that we would have that equipment for fisheries patrol and also so we would have it for drug surveillance.
I suppose what they want to do is get rid of the Armed Forces. I do not know. What is the point of having state of the art equipment like our general purpose frigates and then not putting the equipment on them that is necessary to enable them to be efficient.
I have three questions. How would he equip the Armed Forces? What would he do with the general purpose frigates, of which nine are floating now, if we are not going to have the helicopters for them? How would he provide for the necessary fisheries patrol and air-sea rescue without the EH-10 Is?


Philip Edmonston: Mr. Speaker, I would like to preface my response by saying that having served in the military for three years and having been honourably discharged I am very supportive of our military. It is important that we have a strong military. However when we have-


John Horton McDermid: The American military.


Philip Edmonston: The American military.


Peter L. McCreath: We don't hate the Americans in here, we think they're all right.


An hon. member:: They are our NATO allies.


Philip Edmonston: We have to be careful when we are dealing with the purchase of these helicopters. I believe that these military helicopters are not suited for the job per se because of reports I received. We already have read in the newspapers that these are essentially subhunting helicopters. They have been called Cadillac helicopters.


On the other hand when we try to reason that it will create jobs we have to create smart jobs that will be maintained other than by federal government grants. That is one of the reasons why the former minister of defence, who was always pleading for Quebec, was saying: "We need this business in Quebec. We need our booty". I was always against that because all of Canada needs jobs. We need sustained jobs and not jobs that depend upon the government handing out gifts to different contractors, even if they do come from Quebec.
I do not accept these kinds of make work programs for equipment that we do not need to do that particular job.
In terms of the rescue aspects of these helicopters, I have seen reports that the prop-wash from these helicopters when rescuing someone in an ocean environment would actually drown them. Do not tell me that these are needed, either for rescues or for jobs.


Mr. Francis G. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands - Canso):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate today. I want to compliment my colleague, the hon. member for York North, on his very fine opening speech in this debate. I understand I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Ottawa South.
Next month Canadians will cross a dubious milestone. In April Canada will have spent three years mired in the grip of recession. Even if we accept the brave pronouncement of Mr. Philip Cross of Statistics Canada earlier this year that the Canadian recession is over there is not much to cheer about; not for the 1.5 million individuals who according to Statistics Canada's labour force survey last month were unemployed; not for the 76,139 businesses and individuals who last year slid into bankruptcy, a figure which is 50 per cent higher than in the worst year of the 1981-82 recession.
It has been said that Canadians emerged from the 1981-82 recession lean and mean. If Canadians emerged from that recession lean and mean, then they are coming out of the present one plain scared. The recession has not been like the others. The world has changed and we are in a new game.
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Canadians feel the ground shifting under their feet. Our resource industries, the fishery, agriculture, forestry, and mining no longer generate the kind of secure export jobs they did in the past. The manufacturing sector has been battered. According to the investment firm Wood Gundy, some 363,000 manufacturing jobs were lost between April 1989 and February 1992. In industries from steel to forest products to the fishery to the auto industry, across the whole range of the economy, Canadians have seen their jobs disappear.
These job losses have not been temporary. They have been permanent. Jobs that seemed secure are now in jeopardy. What people used to need to know to make it no longer applies. Canadians who have not already lost their jobs are fearful that they will be next. Businesses that have survived for decades have bitten the dust of bankruptcy or are in trouble.
The federal government and the provincial governments are paralyzed by debt, a disturbing amount of which is owed to foreign bankers. The tough medicine of the budgets of Newfoundland and Saskatchewan last week played more to the bond analysts at Moodys and at Standard and Poor in New York than they did to their own electorate. The budgets of the other provinces will likely follow suit.
Canadians are hoarding, waiting for the next blow to strike. Businesses are not investing. Consumers are not spending. The Canadian economy is not growing. This government, transfixed by its three-year ill timed obsession to wring the last bit of inflation out of the Canadian economy has shown itself incapable of acting in an imaginative and creative way to get the Canadian economy moving again and reposition our economy to take advantage of the new opportunities. There are new opportunities that our changed world presents.
During the last election campaign the Prime Minister boasted to Canadians that the Conservative government was best able to "manage change". We will undoubtedly hear that phrase repeated again and again in the next few months in the mating dance that has been contrived by his party apparatchiks, and that word, as the leading contender knows, is Russian for "hacks", to coronate the Prime Minister's successor.


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This party, which has led Canadians into the morass in which our economy now finds itself, will try to portray the pretenders to the Prime Minister's throne as the leaders best able once again to manage change.
Canadians have already had enough of these managers managing change. What Canadians want is an election to change the managers.
This government has had nearly five years since the last election to show Canadians how well it can manage change. It has had plenty of change to manage, much of it change which it provoked itself.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are now on the unemployment rolls or the welfare lines have experienced the change that this government has produced.
It is worth going back more than eight long years to the economic statement of the former Minister of Finance on November 8, 1984. That document, entitled Agenda for Economic Renewal, was a brave statement of the new government's priorities.
I remember that statement because at the time I was a policy analyst fresh out of university working in the Department of Employment and Immigration. I was keen to apply my new knowledge to the exciting task of renewing the Canadian economy. The themes that ran through that document and to which the government, at least the finance minister, seemed committed were the need to get government finances, meaning the deficit, under control, removing the obstacles to economic growth, and achieving these aims equitably and with a concern for the most needy of Canadians. These were objectives I could get behind, and for four years I worked hard in my own small way to try to help the government achieve them.
It slowly began to dawn on me, as it has been dawning on the vast majority of Canadians, that this government is either uncommitted or incapable of dealing with the fiscal problems facing our country and of preparing Canadians for the economic challenges of the future.
The government began with very favourable circumstances. The federal deficit, though high in the aftermath of the 1982 recession, was declining. When the Tories took office the Canadian economy was surging forward. The new government had a sweeping mandate from the Canadian people for the kind of changes it was proposing in its economic statement. Instead the mandate was squandered. Rather than use the opportunity of
strong economic growth to make sizeable reductions in the deficit, the average deficit from 1984-85 to 1989-90 was some $24 billion per year. The federal debt during that period nearly doubled.
Indeed, in the run up to the election in 1988, the government so over-inflated the economy that the Minister of Finance launched a crisis call within months of that election on the state of the federal finances. Instead of acting decisively to remove obstacles to economic growth during that period, the government shuffled.
At the UI policy analysis directorate where I worked, we waited for the government to follow up in a serious way on its undertaking to correct some of the disincentive problems in the unemployment insurance program. When in 1989, after I left, the government finally screwed up its courage to make changes to the UI program, the changes it made merely weakened the underpinning of that program. It withdrew government financial participation without altering the underlying problems with the UI program itself. The changes in Bill C-113 are more of the same.
This government has known and the Canadian politymaking community has known since well before the last election that the single most important policy challenge facing our country is devising policies and programs and providing the necessary leadership to enable the Canadian economy and the Canadian work force to adjust to what is now being described by some as the new economy.
That is the emphasis on high value-added, knowledge-based, service-oriented industries. It has been widely known that the key ingredient in preparing Canadians for this new reality is a greater commitment on education, specifically in the development as quickly as possible of a highly trained, computer literate work force. The diffusion of that knowledge through the private sector will have a higher emphasis on research and development and on spreading that research and development throughout Canadian industry, be it fish processing or fibre optics.
It has been widely known since well before the recession that the underlying framework of policies in Canada in many ways supported a resistance to change. This resistance to change has been documented by study after study, beginning with the Economic Council of


Canada, which before the last election issued a statement on precisely this subject, called "Managing Adjustment". This government has ignored that statement.
I am hurrying because I realize I have to share my time, so let me just rapidly conclude.
My point in conclusion is that this government has not managed change. This government has resisted, has shuffled and has studied the problem to death over the last four years. It has squandered four valuable years of opportunity to re-position Canada to be ready for the new economy which we now face. That is the tragedy which this government has perpetuated and that is its legacy for Canadians.


Mr. Alex Kindy (Calgary Northeast):: Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to listen to those debates on the economy because what we hear mostly is rhetoric and really no solutions.
If we look at Canada's present economic state, the national debt, provincial, federal and Crown corporations, it is now about $660 billion. That amounts to 95 per cent of the gross domestic product. To put it in perspective, it is the same level of debt that Brazil and Venezuela have. When New Zealand reached 75 per cent of the gross domestic product as its debt, it was declared bankrupt. Recently, we have seen what is happening to Newfoundland in its budget, to Saskatchewan and to Ontario as well.
As we all know, only Ontario Hydro has a debt of $34 billion. It is a bankrupt company.
What do we hear? What do we hear from the government side? We are told for instance, that our exports are up, that we have a surplus in exports, in goods, of $9 billion for this year. What the government forgets to tell us is that in the current account which includes goods, services and financial transactions, there is a deficit of $30 billion for this year.
This means that Canadians have to borrow $30 billion outside of Canada. It cannot be borrowed from Canadians. It has to be borrowed from outside so our foreign debt now reaches the amount of $300 billion. We owe that to foreigners.
What are the solutions? This is what I am trying to find out. The opposition parties and the government side,
Supply
what do they propose to deal with this crisis? They talk about having more-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: In fairness, I have to give the floor to the previous speaker, the hon. member for Cape Breton Highlands-Canso.


Francis G. LeBlanc: share the hon. member's deep concern with the state of the government deficits, provincial and federal. It is a very serious problem. It is a problem that is not going to go away. It is a problem that we are going to have to deal with and to manage as prudently as we can when we form the government.
I want to make one quick point. The best way to deal with the deficit is to create a growing economy, a growing productive, competitive economy. That is my point about adjustment. That is where the government has failed. It has failed. It has wasted four years. The economy has changed and this government has not enabled Canadians to change with that economy. That is what we need to do to have a strong economy to meet the debt obligations which have been incurred by this government. That is my point.


Mr. John Manley (Ottawa South):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate on the economy and economic policies.
In the ten minutes I am allowed, I think I should go straight to the core of this debate. As was pointed out by the hon. member for Cape Breton Highlands-Canso, it isn't easy to deal with the serious problems of debt and deficit.
At this point, however, we must realize the problem is not exclusive to federal and provincial governments, Crown corporations and Ontario Hydro, which has a very large debt, as the hon. member for Calgary pointed out. It is a problem that concerns us all in this country. We must find ways to deal with debt-related problems and with a deficit that is increasing annually at all levels of government.

We have, I believe, reached the point in Canada where we can say without fear of overstatement that our finances are approaching crisis proportions. The level of our debt and deficit is reaching those of countries where the International Monetary Fund has taken action.


Third, we have to invest in infrastructure. Our transportation and communications networks have got to meet the test and the challenges of the 21st century. It is simply not adequate for us to put off spending in those areas.
Fourth, we have to make the tough decisions to focus our resources strategically. We simply do not have excess resources available to squander on projects that are wasteful and which do not accomplish the goals we set for ourselves as a nation. That will not be easy but it is something we have to be prepared to do in an open, fair and sometimes difficult way.
I think none of this can happen if Canadians are not confident they can buy into a program of renewal, that they cannot accept that sacrifices may have to be made. Yet if they do not believe they will succeed in overcoming the obstacles that confront them, they will not support it.
We need commitments in addition to an economic program that stresses growth and creation of jobs. We need two other commitments.
We need a commitment to maintain and preserve on a sustainable basis the environment which is after all at the root of the creation of the wealth that this great country enjoys. We also we need to restate and to emphasize the commitment that we have to the social contract in this country. Canadians need to believe that when times get bad that we will care for one another. We will ensure that we are committed as a nation, not just to the creation of wealth but to the sustainability of our health and education systems, to the alleviation of poverty and to the building of a clean and healthy environment. These commitments have to exist at the same time and with the same intensity as a commitment to the creation of wealth, to the stimulation of jobs, to the reduction of the debt.
If we as leaders in this country can work together toward those objectives, I believe there may be no limit to the commitment that Canadians will show to achieving those objectives.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment my colleague not only for
the fact that he has recognized so insightfully some of the difficulties we are having in this nation today but the fact that he is putting on the table some constructive and very specific ideas. That is what people are looking for today.
It is not just that we would stand up and point out the fact that this government has really lost its sense of compassion and caring. There is the mere fact that the government continues to sit around for almost three months now from its economic statement and does nothing in relation to small business. Yet, government members stand up and say that this particular bill is not through the Elouse of Commons and that is why they are not going to promote the Small Businesses Loans Act.
My question through you, Mr. Speaker, to my colleague is related to small business. We on this side of the House have been saying for years now that the greatest hope for new job creation in this country lies with small business. The entrepreneurial spirit is in the men and women of the 1.1 million operating businesses in this country. That is where we believe the great hope lies for job creation.
I wonder if my colleague, who is also one of our former finance critics, could talk for a minute or so to this House and the people of Canada about some of his ideas on how we could help small business.


Mr. Speaker:: It being two o'clock p.m., pursuant to Standing Order 30(5), the House will now proceed to statements by members pursuant to Standing Order 31.


STATEMENTS PURSUANT TO S. O. 31
Mr. Guy Saint-Julien (Abitibi):: Mr. Speaker, "Jean Charest, a man of reason and a reasonable politician" is the title of an editorial by Andre Pratte, published last Saturday in La Presse, which included the following: "Jean Charest is a politician of reason... Delegates will be won by his intelligence, his grasp of the issues, his moderation and his persuasive arguments".


"In his four years as Minister of State For Youth, he had a chance to examine one of today's pressing problems, the school drop-out rate, and he talks about it today in very concrete terms. Young people do not necessarily drop out of school because of the school system. They drop out for all kinds of reasons. They may be attracted by the large number of jobs available in Southern Ontario as a result of an overheated economy, or, as is the case in Eastern Canada, they don't see the point of staying in school because there are no jobs or because their parents don't encourage them to go to school".
"At a time when everyone wants to be consulted, when many people realize that the national debt is problem number one in this country and when spending cuts raise howls of protest from interest groups, Mr. Charest's proposal that the next federal government be given a clear mandate to fight the deficit may be very attractive to voters."


UNIVERSITY SPORTS
[Stage Direction]
Mr. Francis G. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-
Canso): Mr. Speaker, while we may differ in our political views those of us in this House who are graduates of St. Francis Xavier University share a great pride in our Alma Mater.
We were all thrilled by the exciting performance of the St. F. X. University varsity basketball team yesterday, under the leadership of coach Steve Konchalski, in winning the CIAU championship in basketball with an exciting 72-64 victory over McMaster University in Halifax.
For Nova Scotians yesterday was a double triumph with Acadia University winning the CIAU championship in hockey in Toronto.
The St. F. X. X-men thrilled their fans, as they have all year, with superlative basketball, with Richard Bella, Brian Lee and Blair White in particular turning in outstanding performances yesterday.
Winning the CIAU championship, the first ever for St. F. X., was a particularly fitting tribute to Father George Kehoe, St. F. X.'s much loved former athletic director
who died tragically last year and to whom Coach Konchalski dedicated the team's win.
I know all members of this House, including my colleagues from Hamilton, will join me in congratulating the St. F. X. basketball team on its thrilling performance yesterday.
Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


WORLD HEALTH DAY
Mrs. Barbara Sparrow (Calgary Southwest):: Mr. Speaker, on April 7 we celebrate World Health Day to honour the adoption of the World Health Organization's constitution of 1948.
This year's slogan is "Handle Life with Care-prevent violence and negligence". Three and one-half million people die every year as a result of injury caused by violence, accidental or intentional. Injuries cost Canadians over $11 billion each year, and although this rate is falling injuries are the leading cause of death and the second leading cause of hospitalization of our youth.
Health and Welfare Canada is starting a program to target injury prevention and its evaluation. Safety is everyone's responsibility and must be included in all our policies.


CANADA STUDENT LOANS PROGRAM
Ron Fisher: Mr. Speaker, I received numerous copies of a letter addressed to the Prime Minister from the students of the University of Saskatchewan concerning the proposed changes to the Canada Student Loans Program.
I would like to read part of the letter:
Today, a post-secondary education costs a great deal of money. Not all students have the ability to pay these costs. The Canada Student Loans Program, therefore, has allowed hundreds of thousands of Canadians to further their education regardless of their income status.
Your government has publicly recognized the importance of creating an educated work force. Yet the legislation put forward in Bill C-76 will discourage, rather than encourage students from continuing.
The letter goes on to ask whether the government is so obsessed with deficit reduction that creating an educated and skilled, and therefore competitive, work force is no longer one of its priorities.


I suggest that the government's top priority should be to get Canadians back to work, and that means providing post-secondary education that is accessible to more than just the wealthy.


MORDEN, MANITOBA
Mr. Lee Clark (Brandon -Souris):: Mr. Speaker, on the assumption that good news rarely gets the publicity it deserves I would like to inform the House of an important announcement in Manitoba which occurred on February 9. On that date Monsanto Canada Inc. announced the construction of a $5.1 million, 12,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Morden. At this new plant there will be the production of a new herbicide in a very environmentally safe facility. This plant will mean the employment of some 17 people now, with the possibility of an increase in employment if production increases as is anticipated.
Morden was selected from among some 50 Canadian locations. One of the advantages for Morden was the fact that its proximity to the United States was very important as it is anticipated that there will be sales of some $50 million to the United States in the first year of its operation, which demonstrates the growing importance of the United States as an export market for Canada.


NORTH KOREA
Mr. Jesse Flis (Parkdale-High Park):: Mr. Speaker, the world should be greatly concerned by North Korea's current reckless behaviour. It began last week with diplomats claiming that North Korea was "ready for war" with South Korea because of joint military exercises with U.S. allies. Then North Korea became the first country to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, a giant step backward in the movement to limit the world's doomsday arsenal.
Today we hear from U.S. News and World Report that North Korea and Iran allegedly struck a $630 million deal to develop nuclear ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets in Japan.
Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Is North Korea destined to become the next Iraq, a nuclear renegade on a path to its own destruction?
It seems to me that this new world order is beginning to resemble the old. Hundreds of Canadian soldiers gave up their lives in the last Korean war. Their sacrifice must not be in vain.


UNIVERSITY SPORTS
Mr. Pat Nowlan (Annapolis Valley-Hants):: Mr. Speaker, today there is no Mudville in Wolfville but joy in the town as Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada happily extend hearty congratulations to Coach Coolen and his Acadia crew for bringing home the bacon with a resounding 12-1 victory over the University of Toronto in yesterday's national finals of the CIAU hockey championship.
Acadia's motto Nin Pulvere Vinces was played out in spades for Acadia's first ever national hockey victory, which literally means: From the dust of many defeats comes victory through the collective hard work and effort of all.
In this case it was truly a national victory for the Axemen. Eight provinces were represented on the team and I am sure that in the justified honour to Coach Coolen as Coach of the Year he would be the first to admit that active community support helped along the way.
The national championship for Acadia's 3,500 student body is a delicious delight for the town of Wolfville, which is celebrating its centennial this year, a beautiful blend of town and gown.
Students and Alma Mater of Acadia from coast to coast can stand up and cheer for their boys in garnet and blue who have brought new honour to the hallowed history of Acadia.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


RED CROSS MONTH
Mr. Doug Fee (Red Deer):: Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to remind members of this House that March is Red Cross Month. Every year two and a half million Canadians volunteer time or donate blood to the Red Cross.
The Red Cross Society is also active in many other areas. It provides support to people in their homes, in the form of such services as homemakers, sick room


equipment loans and support for veterans and seniors. Last year 13,000 Canadians who suffered minor emergencies and major disasters were helped by the Red Cross.
Whenever we hear media reports about a natural disaster or a war we will also hear that the Red Cross is there providing assistance. Last year the Red Cross channelled some $34 million worth of aid to people in 80 countries around the world.
I would ask all members of the House to join me in wishing the Red Cross Society and its volunteers a very successful Red Cross Month.


FRENCH LANGUAGE COLLEGES IN ONTARIO
Mr. Jean-Robert Gauthier (Ottawa-Vanier):: Mr. Speaker, many Ontario residents and especially students who wish to continue their education have a vested interest in seeing new community colleges established in Ontario.
According to the province, the federal government is not co-operating.
I will read verbatim a press release issued by Ontario Minister of Education David Cooke, in which he said, and I quote:
There are rumours that the federal government is reneging on its agreement with the province on financing for a French language college in the north and another one in the southwest. It has been almost a year since the province said it was ready to sign the agreement with the federal government. How much longer will francophones in northern and southern Ontario have to wait for the federal government to make up its mind?
There is one community college in Ottawa. There are 2,900 students, and they have the right to be educated in French in Ontario. They have that right under the Constitution.
I want to ask the government to stop dragging its feet and conclude an agreement with the Province of Ontario on the acquisition of the land and building concerned.


FISHERIES
Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I understand that a special committee of cabinet is now working on an adjustment package to assist individuals and communities impacted by the severe reductions in groundfish quotas in the Scotia Fundy and Gulf regions.
I wish to impress upon the government the urgency of this situation. There are significant numbers of people in coastal communities such as Lockeport, Lunenburg and Louisburg who have either exhausted their UI claims or who have been unable to get sufficient work to qualify in the first place. These numbers will drastically increase during the next two to three weeks.
I urge the government, and in particular the ministers of fisheries and employment, to make an announcement this week that will clearly indicate to people in the affected communities that the Government of Canada is there to assist them during this time of particular difficulty.
Today the government must give clear indication that help is on its way and it will be adequate.


POVERTY
Hon. Andre Ouellet (Papineau-Saint-Michel):: Mr. Speaker, last night Radio-Canada broadcast a very moving television program on poverty in Montreal. My congratulations to narrator Ms. Dussault and producer Ms. Payette, who managed to show us the poverty in which, unfortunately, too many Canadians live, while respecting the dignity of these poor mothers and their children.
Under nine years of Conservative rule the gap between rich and poor has widened increasingly. We need an election to replace a government dedicated to the interests of the rich with a Liberal team that has heart and compassion and shows a firm resolve to help the neediest in our society.


SASKATCHEWAN BUDGET
Mr. Geoff Wilson (Swift Current-Maple Creek-As-siniboia):: Mr. Speaker, I applaud the direction of the Government of Saskatchewan in its recent budget which attacks the deficit through expenditure cuts and tax increases in order to "guarantee that all we enjoy today is passed on to our children and our grandchildren".
This is surely sensible advice for all levels of government and just happens to be exactly what the federal government has been doing for the past eight years in order to deal with the Trudeau legacy of debt. Ironically, every single federal taxation measure and program reduction has been opposed by the NDP and Liberal opposition.
I want to congratulate the Saskatchewan provincial NDP for having finally seen the light. Hopefully, the federal NDP members from Saskatchewan will learn from their provincial brethren the importance of and the need for deficit reduction programs, provincial and federal.
 * *


FRIENDSHIP CENTRES
Mr. Rod Murphy (Churchill):: Mr. Speaker, the reason the Government of Saskatchewan has to reduce the deficit is because of the position in which the Devine government left that province.
Across Manitoba, Friendship Centres are being hammered by cold-hearted politicians who simply do not understand their value to society.
Three months ago the federal government announced 10 per cent cuts to selected native programs such as Friendship Centres. Last week, Gary Filmon's Conservative government in Manitoba staggered aboriginal groups by announcing 100 per cent cuts to Indian and Metis Friendship Centres province-wide.
Friendship Centres are worth their weight in gold. In many cases they are the only social safety net available to Canada's urban aboriginal population. Friendship Centres provide counselling and referral services, hostel accommodation, youth, recreation and education programming, interpreters, fine option services, food banks, emergency support, and interpreters for medical care.
If this government understood the need for Friendship Centres it would not be cutting funding it would be increasing it. Our Friendship Centres should not be forced to close.


PEACEKEEPERS
Mr. Ross Belsher (Fraser Valley East):: Mr. Speaker, I ask all members of the House of Commons to take notice of the return from Croatia of the 1st Combat Engineer Regiment.
The 120 personnel from 1st Combat Engineer Regiment stationed at Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack spent six months with the United Nations protection force in the former Yugoslavian republic of Croatia.
In the very difficult environment of post-breakup Yugoslavia the troops distinguished themselves and carried out their duties of maintaining roadways and constructing facilities for use by UN forces. My congratulations to their commanding officer, Major Carmen Bradley.
I was honoured to meet the families of these troops during a welcome home ceremony this past Saturday evening at the base. I doubt whether people who have not been involved with the Canadian forces or had loved ones in the force realize the stress that the children and spouses go through during extended absences like this. These people on the home front have also done an excellent job of supporting the troops.
My congratulations and appreciation goes out to the forces coming home and to their families. We are proud of you.


Some hon. members:: Bravo.


FOREIGN AID
Mrs. Christine Stewart (Northumberland):: Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada has not only made extreme budget cuts to official development assistance, but has changed its development assistance policy with-


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out any public discussion which denies bilateral assistance to the poorest countries and their poorest peoples.
Today, the Liberal caucus is holding a round table discussion on the implications of these cutbacks on the peoples of the African countries, the region most impacted by eight cutbacks and policy changes. We were not pleased when this government unilaterally decided to make our assistance conditional to debt-burdened countries accepting punitive structural adjustment programs. We cannot accept that major objectives of the government, as quoted from its leaked document, are: "to support and promote market-based reforms and trade and investment links between Canada and aid recipients".
I have in hand petitions I received at a Queen's University rally last week. Hundreds of students and thousands of Canadians across this land demand public consultation before policy changes are initiated and that this country continue to priorize the poorest of the poor in our aid program.


SCIENCE
Mr. Howard McCurdy (Windsor-St. Clair):: Mr. Speaker, even as the federal government cut funding from crucial Canadian science programs it was happily doling out more money to send into orbit, $10 million more into orbit this year than last. What does it do with most of this money? Over $1.5 billion will go to help build the U.S. space station.
With a new President in the White House there might not even be a space station. The Americans are realizing that you get far better economic spin-offs from science on the ground than from megaprojects high up in outer space. We have already wasted $300 million that could have better laid the groundwork for the kind of value-added, knowledge-based economy that creates the stable, high-paying jobs that people desperately need.
For the thousands of Canadian unemployed the final frontier is not space. It is that last unemployment insurance cheque before the oblivion of absolute poverty. That is a frontier we should be making sure no one explores.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Ms. Sheila Copps (Hamilton East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
As we speak, there are 400,000 young Canadians who cannot find work. On the other hand, we have 300,000 jobs that cannot be filled because we do not have people who possess the required skills.
As the Prime Minister orchestrates his departure, is he proud of a legacy that leaves one in five young Canadians without a job?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I think it goes without saying that members on all sides of this House find the unemployment of our youth today unacceptably high. That is why the government has been concentrating on training and retraining programs to try and encourage those who have dropped out of school early-some 30 per cent drop out of school and that is an unacceptably high rate as well-to get back into the work force to get some training they need that will bring them into today's reality in the economic picture that we find ourselves in.
There is some $3.5 billion being spent on training and retraining and that, I believe, is a very positive sign that this government is doing something to encourage the young people to get back to work.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, the truth is that as we near the end of the Mulroney era
400,000	young people are out of work. One young person out of five is looking for work. However 300,000 jobs cannot be filled because no one has the right training.
I want to ask the Prime Minister just this: What happened to his promise that training programs would be provided following the signing of the Free Trade Agreement? Why did he betray Canadians?


Right Hon. Brian Mulroney (Prime Minister):: As
usual, the hon. member's statement is wrong. Today $3.8 billion is being spent on manpower retraining programs, especially for young people in Canada. This is unprecedented. An interesting point is that we managed to do


this despite fierce opposition from the hon. member's party.
Every time we introduced a bill in the House to create jobs for young people or increase amounts allocated to the retraining program the hon. member for Hamilton East voted against it.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Yes, Mr. Speaker, I voted against his unemployment insurance bill and I am proud of that.

In the last four years of Prime Minister Mulroney's mandate 325,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. Anyone who represents an industrial riding will see the devastation day by day, week by week that is causing.
I want to ask the Prime Minister this. In the dying days of his government, will he make good on his personal promise to have specific retraining programs for those workers who lost their jobs as a result of his free trade agreement?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, with regard specifically to the free trade agreement, perhaps my hon. friend would like eventually to discuss some facts. On an annual basis Canada exported $19.6 billion more to the United States in 1992 than in 1988. In January 1993 our exports to the United States were 23 per cent ahead of the level in January 1992.
My hon. friend refers to the Mulroney accomplishments. My hon. friend refers to the Mulroney record. I am thereby forced, despite my modesty, to mention some facts to my hon. friend. As of the end of December 1992 employment in Canada was up by 1.3 million jobs from the September 1984 level; from 1984 to 1991 employment grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 per cent, the fastest of G-7 countries; inflation was at its lowest level in 30 years; and interest rates were at their lowest level in 21 years.
This compares with a record by the Liberals of unemployment of 11.8 per cent, interest rates at 22.75 per cent and inflation at 12.9 per cent, the worst record since statistics were compiled in the history of Canada. That
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was the Liberal record and this is the Mulroney record and we are proud of it.


NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister for International Trade.
Speaking Friday at McGill, Bob Dunn, an economist at George Washington University, said that the Governments of Canada and the United States are using misleading data on the job losses that will result from the NAFTA deal. Professor Dunn said that both the Canadian and American governments are choosing not to speak about the true jobless figures from NAFTA.
I ask the minister: Why is he hiding the true job loss figures? When will he let Canadians know the whole story on NAFTA job losses?


Hon. Michael Wilson (Minister of Industry, Science and Technology and Minister for International TVade):: Mr. Speaker, I think my hon. friend wrote that question before he heard the answer from the Prime Minister two questions ago.
I will give the answer again. Thank you very much for the subsequent question. The answer is that in the month of January we had a remarkable increase in exports and that follows on a period in 1992 where exports from Canada to the United States under the free trade agreement were up by 16 per cent. This is a huge increase which demonstrates that Canadian companies are finding business opportunities in the United States and turning those opportunities into jobs back here in Canada.
It is a curious thing. That article that my friend is reading was from the same day that these statistics came out, but there was not one mention of those statistics in that article. It is a curious thing that the media would not bring the two into the same article to get some balance in the reporting.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is to the minister who neglects to say that 80 per cent of our exports to the United States were duty free before the trade deal. He does not seem to make a connection with the ongoing nature of those


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exports. He also overlooks the 1.5 million people who are still out of work in this country.
If the minister is so sure the professor does not know what he is talking about, why does he not put his money where his mouth is? Will he make public the government's own economic impact statements on the proposed NAFTA deal? Will he tell us how many more Canadian workers are going to lose their jobs because of this proposed three-way NAFTA deal? Do not talk about the past. Tell us about your impact studies and what they say about the NAFTA.


Michael Holcombe Wilson: Mr. Speaker, it is quite amazing that this member should talk about putting his money where his mouth is.
I sat five feet away from him in 1980 when he was asked whether he would resign if interest rates went up again. He said: "Yes, I will resign". What happened when interest rates went up to 22 per cent? He sat right there twiddling his thumbs, never a thought of resignation, never a thought of the principle that he is talking about now. I will put my money where my mouth is anytime this hon. member wants to do the same thing.


An hon. member:: Any more questions, Herb?


Michael Holcombe Wilson: I want to refer to a study not done by the government but through the C. D. Howe Institute. It says: "Free trade with the United States has helped the development of the higher value-added industries that are crucial to Canada's future economic growth, a result that is consistent with the predictions of supporters of the agreement". That is an impact study done by an independent observer that says that the free trade agreement has been good for Canada and good for Canadians.


PUBLIC WORKS
Mr. Steve Butland (Sault Ste. Marie):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Public Works. It concerns the P.E.I. fixed-link.
On February 24, in response to a question from my colleague, the hon. member for Saanich-Gulf Islands,
the Minister of the Environment said "there has been an environmental assessment done on the project".
On Friday the Federal Court ruled that this government has violated its own environmental guidelines and that a generic study of a generic bridge design is unacceptable. Judge Reed even called the process so far downright silly.
Given this court's decision and the extent of public interest in this review, will the minister take this process out of the back rooms and proceed immediately with a full proper environmental assessment of the specific bridge proposal complete with public hearings?


Hon. Elmer M. MacKay (Minister of Public Works):: Mr. Speaker, we appreciated Madam Justice Reed's prompt decision on this matter. It is a comprehensive decision. This government has always, as he will recall, undertaken to abide by the process right from the beginning.
He will not be surprised, however, to know that I have not had an opportunity to discuss this matter with cabinet colleagues or with other levels of government, although I did have a quick call from Premier McKenna who offered his support. I have not had a chance yet to speak to the Prince Edward Island government for obvious reasons. I will have to wait in order to discuss it with the new premier, perhaps.
In any event, the member and the House can be sure that we will be looking at this extensively. I will be able to report to him and to the House within a few days.


Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate -that it is going to be a difficult one for the minister. While the minister decides the fate of the project, he must not allow a repeat of the Rafferty-Ala-meda and Oldman River dam situations where work went ahead on the projects while the environmental reviews were going on.
Will the minister ensure that a similar fiasco is not repeated and ensure that the project is not continued even one day more while the environmental assessments are incomplete?


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Mr. Speaker, as I have indicated to my colleague, we will look at the implications of this very carefully. We have


always respected the process. Certainly we will not do anything that would be inimical to the judicial process.
I will have a fuller answer for him in a few days.


Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, a final supplementary question. We are not going to give up.
The court ruling also stated that the plan to end ferry service between the island and the mainland is unconstitutional. Yet Bill C-110, the enabling legislation which does just that, is currently being rushed through the legislative process. This is not only inappropriate but unconstitutional. Will the minister withdraw Bill C-110 immediately?


Elmer MacIntosh MacKay: Mr. Speaker, this again is part of the process we will have to look at. My colleague knows that in the agreement signed between the federal government, by myself, and the Government of Prince Edward Island certain assurances were given by that government that whatever steps deemed to be necessary would be taken in order to cure any constitutional problems.
Bill C-110 is something that has been considered in committee. It may well be that it is not project specific legislation but legislation that might be useful in the future for any project.
However, he can be sure we are not going to do anything rash or precipitous.


Hon. Lloyd Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
Yesterday the Prime Minister, along with other heads of government, reaffirmed his commitment to the process of democracy and market reform taking place in Russia. Given the very serious and deteriorating situation in that country, I would like to ask the Prime Minister if he could tell us if any new specific plan of action or of assistance is being developed by Canada along with the other western countries prior to the
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meetings of President Yeltsin and President Clinton in Vancouver, so that the west and Canada can show their good faith to the Russian people, that we very much care about their anxious desire for reform.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for a very important question.
Late last week I was in touch with Chancellor Kohl in a lengthy telephone conversation in regard to what we might do together with President Clinton and other leaders around the world. I share my hon. friend's concern about the absolute necessity to maintain the democratic institutions that are growing in Russia and the market reforms, without which there can be no successful future for these institutions of democracy itself in Russia.
We have strongly supported President Yeltsin's initiatives. We have conveyed our support for him, his initiatives, and the process at this important juncture in Russian history.
It is my expectation, although one does not know, that the Vancouver summit will proceed as scheduled. Canada will be ready to proceed with new and we think constructive and creative approaches which will help the Russian people and the Russian President in his endeavours and his important initiatives to build a democratic, market-driven society in Russia.
I thank my hon. friend for the support I know he will give to the Government of Canada as we work with our colleagues in the G-7 and elsewhere to help bring this about.


Lloyd Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, last spring when President Yeltsin visited this city the Prime Minister and the government made a number of commitments to provide encouragement and support for grain shipments, nuclear safety projects, humanitarian assistance and a special scholarship fund.
As things stand now, grain shipments to Russia have been suspended for the last six or seven months. The announced $30 million nuclear safety program and the $10 million Yeltsin democracy fellowship have not yet been implemented. Our humanitarian assistance is on the decline.
I ask a very serious question of the Prime Minister. How can we expect to believe the Prime Minister when the commitments made almost a year ago have not yet


Oral Questions
been fulfilled. If the Prime Minister is serious about his support, as he just stated, will he authorize the restoration of grain shipments to Russia and release the funds already committed to implement the initiatives announced last June.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, Canada among the leaders of the countries of the G-7 has the second highest per capita assistance to countries of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, second only to Germany.
Germany's large numbers come from the fact that there was a special capitalization program in the federal republic to pay for the removal of 350,000 Russian soldiers who were on their territory. On a per capita basis, Canada's assistance to the former Soviet Union, including Russia, exceeds that of all other G-7 countries, with the exception of Germany as I have indicated. So my friend's question is somewhat surprising.
In fact many of the G-7 leaders are suggesting to their legislatures and their Parliaments that they raise their contributions and the nature of their programs to match those of Canada, which on a per capita basis, put together as a package, would represent a veiy significant infusion of technical assistance, agricultural assistance and market reform possibilities.
My friend refers to President Yeltsin's visit in June. We have lived up to every one of the commitments that we have made. My friend mentions the Yeltsin Democracy Fellowships as not having been honoured. I met in my office two weeks ago with participants in the Yeltsin Democracy Fellowships and they were very grateful. They came from Russia.


Lloyd Axworthy: What about the grain shipments?


Martin Brian Mulroney: No, my hon. friend mentioned the Yeltsin democracy fellowships. Unless I made a mistake and these were not young Russians standing in my office. They were there under the aegis of the Yeltsin Democracy Fellowships and very grateful to Parliament and the Government of Canada. In fact one of them specifically asked that I convey his affection and best wishes to the member from Winnipeg.


SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Ms. Mary Clancy (Halifax):: Mr. Speaker, on Friday I raised a question regarding two cases of sexual harassment in the Public Service in Halifax and was told to refer them to the President of the Treasury Board. I am doing so to the Acting President of the Treasury Board.
The final report on this case has been out for over a month. It found sexual harassment and so I ask: What will this minister do to ensure that these men are justly punished?


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, the President of the Treasury Board is well aware of the case. He has indicated to the House that sexual harassment is absolutely unacceptable in any aspect of the Public Service and actions are now being looked at. It is an active file on the minister's desk and the appropriate action will be taken.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Mr. Speaker, I would be more reassured if I had not been told today by the investigations conciliation officer of the Public Service that the conciliation process which is, as the minister says, under way will not, and I reiterate will not, deal with sanctions.
Again I ask the minister what sanctions will be applied so that the message of zero tolerance, which I do not necessarily dispute, is at least credible to the people who perpetrate these actions?


Harvie Andre: Mr. Speaker, the President of the Treasury Board has said on several occasions, and he meant it sincerely and it is reflective of the government's policies, that the appropriate action will be taken.


UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
Ms. Joy Langan (Mission-Coquitlam):: Mr. Speaker, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, representing front line workers in unemployment insurance offices, today released a booklet outlining what working people should know about changes to the UI act.
The booklet outlines the hassles workers claiming benefits are going to have to deal with. Could the minister or whoever is responding tell the members of this House how he will be providing Canadians with this type of factual information so that those who must apply for UI will clearly know the rules?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, there will be brochures printed and available to all those wish to have them, including the unemployment offices throughout this country.


Joy Langan: Mr. Speaker, I would like it better if I knew they were going to every household.
The regulations concerning child care under the new UI amendments create a situation where if you cannot find child care, if you cannot get leave and you quit your job because you cannot get that child care, you will not get UI. The government is forcing parents to settle for untrained, unskilled and unknown child care.
I would like to ask the government what would the family caucus and child care advocates have to say about this? How can quitting to ensure the protection of your children be called voluntary quitting and have the parent not eligible for UI?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, the preamble to that question is erroneous and I think the hon. member knows that. The officials of the Canada Employment Centres will review each case and if there is just cause, the people will receive unemployment insurance benefits. That is the assurance of the minister and the government.
For the hon. member to be spreading these fears around is totally irresponsible.


MONTREAL ECONOMY
Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Acting Minister of Finance.
Montreal's economy is in a terrible slump, with an unemployment rate of 14 per cent, 27 per cent of the labour force out of work and 21 per cent of families living below the poverty line.
Oral Questions
Why did the government not agree, as requested by the city and the province, to participate in a municipal infrastructure reconstruction program that would stimulate the economy and create jobs?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I know the hon. member and his party are talking about handing money to municipal infrastructure programs.
I would like to remind the hon. member, because he was a member of the government in 1982, that it had a municipal government infrastructure program and cancelled it. It was cancelled because it said it was not the responsibility of the federal government. I remember that veiy clearly. I am sure he does also because we were in the House together at that time.
There is a modest infrastructure program, due to the fiscal situation that we find ourselves in, that was announced by the Minister of Finance in December. I can tell the hon. member that those discussions are ongoing with the provinces and announcements will be made in due course.


William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, the program we had during the last recession was kept through that recession period.
If the government really wanted to create jobs, stimulate economic growth and reduce the deficit it would initiate such an infrastructure program. Poverty in Montreal and elsewhere in Canada will not be reduced by part-time, minimum wage jobs with no security and no future.
Why is the government not taking steps to promote quality jobs with decent salaries so that young couples can start families and properly take care of them?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend surprises me with his solicitude for Montreal. When we had a bill on pharmaceutical legislation before the House that would create thousands of new jobs in Montreal and provoke over $1 billion in new investment, my hon. friend voted against it.
My hon. friend says quite-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Oral Questions


Mr. Speaker:: The right hon. Prime Minister has the floor.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I say this in full friendship. My hon. friends, the caucus of the Liberal Party, were warned by their leader last week not to be nervous Nellies, to appear to be confident and relaxed. I know how tough that will be for them, but convey an air of confidence.


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Mr. Speaker:: Perhaps the right hon. Prime Minister could try again.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, they asked me for months, they stood in the House, including my old friend from NDG and said to me: "Prime Minister, you have to quit". So I did and now they want me back. I do not know, is it too late?
It would be with great difficulty but I would forgive him his vote against the pharmaceutical bill even though it created thousands of jobs in Montreal. But because of what he said in regard to the fact that it alone-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, if the Liberals want to know why they are sinking like a stone, just turn to the member for Hamilton East.
To answer my friend's question, the pharmaceutical bill does not solve all the problems, obviously not at all, but this attitude brings about some important matters, for example just in the month of February.

A Maison des regions was created in Montreal, with a federal contribution of $1.4 million.

"Neuro gets $8.1 million to map brain".

Thirty million dollars for research at l'Enfant-Jesus and l'Hotel Dieu hospitals in Quebec City. Governments have agreed to spend $20 million on Mont-Tremblant over the next five years which means jobs for 700 or 800 people, plus 1,000 permanent jobs. Northern Telecom
will get millions of dollars from Japan for its plant in Lachine.

Bombardier is about to choose an engine for the new global express executive jet, creating 1,000 new jobs. These are the kinds of things brought about by low inflation, low interest rates and record new investment in Canada, and that is the way we will get Montreal moving again.


EMPLOYMENT
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (St. Boniface):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Acting Minister of Employment and Immigration.
There are almost 50,000 men and women who are unemployed in Manitoba today. Roughly one-quarter of those unemployed people are young men and women between the ages of 15 and 24. Manitoba has the country's highest and fastest growing rate of poverty. It is the poorest of the poor among youth. Manitobans are tired of this despair. They want action.
What specific measures is the government prepared to take to get these people back to work, to eradicate poverty, to remove the despair Manitobans are feeling at this very minute?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, time would not allow me to list the number of endeavours this government has undertaken, but we could start with the $3.8 billion we are spending in training and retraining.
Let me be specific because I think it is very important. Some 326,000 Canadians will receive skills training. Of these 164,000 will receive the training through the Unemployment Insurance Commission at a cost of some $430 million and another 160,000 will be trained on a feepayer's basis. There is self-employment assistance of some $110 million.
There is a list-I could go on and on-of the assistance we are providing for young people to get into the work force, especially through training and retraining to upgrade their skills or to give them skills if they have dropped out of school at an early age and want to come back to take training and retraining.


Ron J. Duhamel: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is for the same minister. Those programs are doing nothing today for the 12,000 young people without work.

The minister tells us these policies and programs will deal with the situation. That is just not true and he knows it. Why is there so much unemployment in Manitoba? Fifty-five per cent of the unemployed are young people. Why is there so much poverty in Manitoba which has the highest youth poverty rate in Canada? Why do so many people go to food banks in Manitoba? I am told this year there will be over 100,000. What is the government going to do now, to put these people back to work?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I am surprised the hon. member minimizes the training and retraining. Just a few moments ago his colleague from Hamilton East said that what young people needed was training and retraining.


Ron J. Duhamel: Yes, and I wish you would do it.


John Horton McDermid: They cannot have it both ways over there on the Liberal benches although they try to.
We feel training and retraining are the most important elements to get young people trained and back into the work force in meaningful high-tech jobs. We are doing it and it is paying benefits. We have seen employment rise every month over the last 11 months and we expect it to continue that way.


NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Guy St-Julien: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of the Environment. The North American Free Trade Agreement provides for environmental protection measures unequalled in any other trade agreement in force today. NAFTA protects our right to establish and enforce our own strict environmental standards.
Could the minister explain his position on this side agreement on the environment with Mexico and the
Oral Questions
Americans and tell us why he is not proceeding with amendments to the Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States?


Hon. Jean J. Charest (Minister of the Environment):: Mr. Speaker, the Department of the Environment, which I have the privilege of heading, was directly involved in the discussions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. In fact, the agreement that came out of the negotiations is probably the greenest free trade agreement in existence today. It contains a commitment by the countries to sustainable development which constitutes a precedent, especially after the Earth Summit in Rio, and it also contains a commitment by each country to set standards they deem appropriate, as well as a commitment not to relax standards, legislation or regulations for the purpose of attracting investment.
Even more significant is a committment in the agreement or, should I say, parallel to it, to create a North American commission on the environment. The parties are now discussing the mandate of such a commission, and I hope we will be able to finalize the Free Trade Agreement as such so that we can have a continental approach to the environment.


PEARSON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Donald Alex Blenkarn: Mr. Speaker, my question is also for the Minister of the Environment.
The minister will know that there was an environmental assessment review on the expansion of the Lester B. Pearson airport in Toronto. The minister will also know that the Minister of Transport has totally disregarded this environmental assessment review in the expansion of that airport.
Will the minister direct that the environmental review process be followed and that the environmental review process mean something in the expansion of government work?


Jean J. Charest: Mr. Speaker, I disagree with the hon. member's conclusions on whether or not the recommendations have been followed.


Oral Questions
I understand the hon. member has a great deal of concern for this issue and I share his concern, but in regard to the environmental assessment itself the government has followed a certain number of recommendations. It has made some evaluations in regard, for example, to the runways and the recommendations made in the report. It also found that its own experts did not agree with some of the recommendations made in the report, more specifically on the north-south runway and for that reason chose to follow the course it has followed.
I may add by way of information for the hon. member, whether on this issue or another one mentioned earlier today, that individual departments direct the environmental assessments according to the environmental assessment review guidelines we are now living under.
That is a critical element in the implementation of the environmental concern. It is critically important that each department assume its environmental responsibilities and that it takes the recommendations in regard to the over-all concerns they have to deal with, and that is what the Department of Transport has done.


CRIME PREVENTION
Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice. Elowever, before I ask it I want to tell my good friend, the Prime Minister, that I hope he does not change his mind. I am looking forward to seeing him where old prime ministers go: Madam TUssaud's or whatever.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Heaven.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: There is another direction too.
At the recent conference on crime prevention in Toronto the minister and his officials heard the same kind of evidence that our justice committee heard, namely that we prevent crime by tackling the social and economic conditions that cause crime. When the justice committee heard the same evidence we arrived at a number of recommendations.
What is the minister doing about those recommendations? It seems to me that for him and his colleague, the
Solicitor General, it is all talk and no action. What is he doing about the recommendations?


Hon. Pierre Blais (Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and Minister of State (Agriculture)):: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend should recognize the results of the symposium in Toronto were very good because we got everybody together, from all parties as well, and I think we are going in the same direction.
We got the report from the standing committee about three weeks ago. I announced in Toronto that we were going to have a comite du suivi which would bring all elements of the symposium together. I will go to cabinet very soon to get some initiatives before the House, I would say, this spring.


Ian Gardiner Waddell: Mr. Speaker, the minister talks about a comite du suivi or an advisory committee to follow this up. I ask the minister to be specific, because we were in our recommendations. We need a national crime prevention policy with a national council.
I ask the minister to tell the House who is going to be appointed to this committee that he talked about. What is the selection process? Who will the committee report to? What are its responsibilities and what is the timetable? I ask him to be specific, for some action and less talk.


Pierre Blais: Mr. Speaker, I should remind my hon. friend that the symposium was last week. We are just about 10 days past that symposium.
I made a commitment at the symposium that we will get all those good ideas and good initiatives on the table. Before announcing what we are going to do I thought it was better to get what the people wanted us to do.
With this consultation process done now, with the standing committee report all together, I think going to cabinet to get the government's position on those different issues is the way to do things.
I mentioned in my previous answer that we were going to bring it to the House this spring. It is a good time frame.

Oral Questions
[Translation)	FISHERIES
I think it is entirely reasonable to assume that this spring we will be able to introduce initiatives in response to the recommendations made by the symposium and the standing committee.


CANADA SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM
Mrs. Edna Anderson (Simcoe Centre):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of small businesses, science and technology.
All hon. members should agree that the Canada Scholarship Program has been an important incentive for many of our young people to enter university and to study science and engineering. The students of today will be crucial to Canada's competitiveness tomorrow.
Could the government comment on its plans for the future of this program and what it plans to do to assist young people in learning technological trades?


Sheila Maureen Copps: How is your householder, Edna?


Hon. Tom Hockin (Minister for Science and Minister of State (Small Businesses and Tourism)):: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend opposite asks the member asking the question whether this is for her householder. I hope it is because she has been behind technological training for youth ever since she was elected to Parliament.
The program she is speaking of, the Canada Scholarship Program, is sponsored not only by the government but also by educators and by industry. We now have 2,500 scholarships annually under this program.
I would like to remind the House that we have announced a new scholarship program beginning this year for first-year diploma program students entering technology. There are going to be 800 scholarships for these technology students and it will grow to 1,600 scholarships by the year 1995. My hon. friend will be interested to know that a minimum of 50 per cent of the scholarships are awarded to women.


Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
The minister will know that Nova Scotia fishermen feel somewhat abandoned by the minister of fisheries and the government for their failure to put in place an adequate compensation package.
In view of the seriousness of the situation on the east coast, what specific plan of action and time frame do the minister have in mind to assist these fishermen, plant workers and communities in their time of crisis?


Hon. John C. Crosbie (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency):: Mr. Speaker, the hon. gentleman realizes of course that we do not have a moratorium in the fishery in the areas he is referring to so it is not, strictly speaking, comparable to the situation in the northern cod area.
Nevertheless, the reduction in the total allowable catch is very severe this year. There will be some thousands of people affected as to whether they become eligible for UI or not. With respect to what we can do for the fishery and processing plant workers, we are reviewing that situation. It is quite complicated because there are fisheries going ahead that will be quite profitable in other than groundfish species. The government is reviewing the situation.
We have to remember that most people are on UI at the moment and the fishermen will not be coming off UI until the middle of May. We still have some time to see whether any extraordinary steps are needed.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, the minister of fisheries is not only the minister responsible for that department. He is also responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. He knows full well the frightening high unemployment in some of the communities in Atlantic Canada. In fact in industrial Cape Breton it is 28.5 per cent, an alarming rate for any community in this country. Now thousands of fishermen and their families are having to turn to welfare and other means in order to provide for themselves.


Oral Questions
I ask the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans who is seized with this particular problem and has been reviewing it for an extended period of time what specific plan of action, and the time frame for that plan of action, he is prepared to implement to assist those fishermen, those communities and those plant workers. Those Canadians deserve an answer.


John Carnell Crosbie: Mr. Speaker, our Atlantic groundfish management plan was announced the middle of December 1992. As I have said regular programs are in place, including the regular unemployment insurance program, and most people are covered, if not all, under those programs now.
There may well be as we approach May some people who come off the unemployment insurance program who will be affected so there is still time to review the situation.
There are many programs available: the Community Futures program, the Atlantic Adjustment Program and FAP, the Fisheries Alternatives Program. These are all being examined to see if we need more flexibility and what additional steps are needed. An announcement will be made in due course.


Hon. Roger C. Simmons (Burin -St. George's):: Mr. Speaker, the minister of fisheries to whom I direct my question will know that today in Sydney and tomorrow in Halifax fishermen are expressing their outrage at the way the government is handling the fisheries crisis.
To sit here and listen to his responses to my colleague a moment ago one would think there is no problem. One would think that one program or another is taking care of all those people. That just is not the case.
How does he explain the outrage being expressed in Sydney today and in Halifax tomorrow? Is he all right and those fishermen all wrong, or is there maybe some truth to the charge that the government has failed those people in terms of the compensation package he ought to be making available to them?


John Carnell Crosbie: Mr. Speaker, we are all familiar with the nature of campaigns that are launched and under way from time to time in connection with people who want
the government to take action in one direction or another.
It is a common feature of all those campaigns. Outrage is a very considerable part of a campaign so I am quite familiar with the fact that outrage is being expressed. I am also familiar with the fact that we have many programs under way that are assisting fishermen and plant workers throughout Atlantic Canada. We are going to be spending $780 million to $800 million under the northern cod program. We are spending an additional $584 million under the Atlantic Fisheries Adjustment Program. We are reviewing the situation to see what additional assistance might be needed or what additional flexibility might be needed to assist the people who may require assistance because of the lower TACs this year.
Present programs at the moment are looking after them, but these present programs may well not be adequate after May. Naturally it is a feature of demonstrations and the like that people express their dissatisfaction and their disgruntlement. That is the nature of demonstrations.


PRESENCE IN THE GALLERY
Mr. Speaker:: I wish to draw to the attention of members the presence in the gallery of the Honourable Vassyl Durdynetz, First Deputy Chairman, Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Mr. Speaker:: I also draw their attention to the presence in the gallery of Mr. Tassos Karamarios, member of the Greek Parliament.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


POINTS OF ORDER
Joy Langan: Mr. Speaker, when the minister responded to my question on unemployment insurance today he suggested that I was using erroneous information.
I would like to take this opportunity to table the government document from which my question arose and in which it is said that a person voluntarily leaving employment by personal choice to take care of her child


and then applying for regular benefits would have difficulty in showing just cause as required by the act.


Mr. Speaker:: Would the House give the member permission to table the document? Is there permission?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if the Chair would give some consideration to a term which seems to be used fairly often in this Chamber by members opposite, the word erroneous.
I am sure the Chair would note that when a question is put sometimes the response is that it is erroneous in terms of its factual content. That gives a certain perception to the viewing audience which I believe to be inaccurate and unfair. At the same time those of us on this side could in supplementary questions accuse the government of being erroneous in its facts. I am wondering where this will lead us to.
Would the Chair take it under advisement to take a look at the implications and the fact that I believe motive is being impugned here. I do not think that is part of our Standing Orders and I do not think it is part of the traditions in the House to impugn the motives of hon. members who rise in their places to ask specific questions of ministers or of ministers who make responses to hon. members opposite.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member has asked if the Speaker would comment on the use of the word erroneous. I might but I think I would prefer to wait until I have the full context of how the word was used and the circumstances under which the complaint was brought, because words in themselves without the context are not always the best guide to members.
I appreciate the comment of the hon. member for Cape Breton-East Richmond.
Routine Proceedings



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 32(2) I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the report on the accounts administered on behalf of the Government of Canada by the Export Development Corporation for fiscal year 1990-1991.
My intent in tabling this report is that Your Honour may be apprised of the usage and performance of the Canada accounts during the referenced fiscal year.


GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO PETITIONS
Mr. Charles A. Langlois (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to 17 petitions.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]



CONFERENCE OF SPEAKERS OF PARLIAMENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Pursuant to Standing Order 34,1 have the honour to present to the House, in both official languages, the report on the meeting of the Steering Committee of the Conference of Speakers of Parliaments of the Commonwealth, held in Windhoek, Namibia, from January 3 to January 8, 1993.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]


Routine Proceedings HOUSE MANAGEMENT
76TH REPORT OF STANDING COMMITTEE


Charles A. Langlois: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present the 76th Report of the Standing Committee on House Management, on the membership of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-112.
Pursuant to Standing Order 113(1), this report is deemed adopted when laid upon the table.]
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]



MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT RETIRING ALLOWANCES ACT


Peter L. McCreath: for leave to introduce Bill C-418, an act to amend the Members of Parliament Retiring Allowances Act.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to make a few brief remarks on the introduction of this bill.
The pensions of members of Parliament have been the subject of much discussion and a certain amount of mischief in recent years. Notwithstanding the mischief makers the Canadian public must realize that a readily accessible pension plan is a quid pro quo to the attraction of high calibre mid-career Canadians other than independently wealthy Canadians to leave their careers to serve as members of Parliament.
What is legitimately objectionable to the public is the notion that a person can come here early in adult life, serve a few years, and then leave to pursue another career while drawing a parliamentary pension potentially for several decades.
It is this problem that is addressed by the proposed legislation. It would simply indicate that parliamentary pensions cannot be drawn until the recipient reaches the age of 55. Its application would be to all persons including current incumbents elected to the next and subsequent Parliaments.
I recognize that a private member's bill is largely a symbolic act. However, if we as members are to be responsive to the public, we must be prepared to openly address these issues. As for myself, I believe we need a total review of pensions in Canadian society. All too often people are locked into careers by their pension arrangements that they would sooner leave. Others have no pensions at all.
I believe it is time for a mandatory, universally portable, individual pension scheme for Canadians that would apply equally for all Canadians including members of Parliament.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Mr. McCreath moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.


PETITIONS
Ron J. Duhamel: Mr. Speaker, the petitioners call upon the government to ensure that on French and English radio and television, steps are taken to minimize the use of inappropriate language in programs and thus reduce the occurence of violence.

They really believe that much of the language and acts of violence on radio and television is in fact counterproductive to what people are trying to do in terms of the models they have set up for their families. They ask the government, indeed all parliamentarians, to reduce it and to remove it if at all possible.


Ron J. Duhamel: I have a second petition today from residents of Saskatchewan.

They reflect the sentiments of Canadians throughout the country when they ask the government to review its policies on education. They condemn the government for having applied the 3 per cent tax on student loans and particularly the latest measure where it added another six months' interest to student loans.
They really believe that the loans program is inadequate and that it has to be revised. They are really quite afraid of the new proposal coming from the government where the banks will become involved. They are wondering who will set the eligibility criteria, what the role of the banks will be and whether or not that will diminish access to post-secondary education.

I support them because I think this is an excellent petition.


Hon. William Rompkey (Labrador):: Mr. Speaker, about a year ago Mrs. Wanda Quigley of Wabush, Labrador, circulated a petition across Canada which attracted over 25,000 signatures with regard to the production of a test kit for meningococcal disease. She lost a child to that dreaded disease.
This petition is presented on behalf of a large number of people in the province of Nova Scotia who call upon Parliament to urge the government to obtain ownership of the test kit and to have the situation with Health and Welfare Canada resolved so that the test kit can be on the market and available to Canadians.


Chris Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, in accordance with Standing Order 36, I have the privilege to present a petition to this House dealing with violence on television.
Many studies have shown a link between violence in entertainment and desensitization to violence in our society. Hundreds of children, women and men are
Routine Proceedings
killed and are subject to inhumanities as a result. In particular, part of the culture of violence is the serial killer board game that comes with a bag of 25 babies. The point of it is to murder as many defenceless children and adults as possible.
The laws do not deal with this at the moment. The petition signed by over 80 people from Saskatoon asks Parliament to consider amending the Criminal Code so that violent and degrading materials such as the serial killer board game can be kept from being distributed in Canada.


Mr. Joe McGuire (Egmont):: Mr. Speaker, I wish to join my colleague, the hon. member for Labrador, in presenting a petition concerning meningococcal disease which has taken the lives of many children in Canada.
I am reminded of the death of young Islanders to this dreaded disease that gives almost no warning and no time really for treatment. The government should do whatever it can at the Department of National Health and Welfare to make this kit available that tests all types of meningitis at its early stages.
The names on this petition are from Summerside, basically Prince and King's counties, Prince Edward Island. I encourage the government to respond very quickly to this petition.


Mr. David D. Stupich (Nanaimo -Cowichan):: Mr. Speaker, the petition I have is signed by a number of people on Vancouver Island. It draws attention to the fact that the proposed North American free trade agreement has resulted in even greater trade concessions being demanded of Canada.
This agreement would cause Canada to lose more good jobs. If implemented, this trade agreement will result in further restrictions being placed on the ability of Canada's federal, provincial and territorial governments now and in the future from assisting Canadian industries, conserving Canadian natural resources for Canadian benefit and advancing needed social progress.
The petitioners call upon the House to reject the proposed North American free trade agreement and to recommend to the government that it use the termination clause to end the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.


Routine Proceedings


Mr. Gilles Rocheleau (Hull-Aylmer):: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, it is my pleasure to table a petition from young people in the riding of Hull- Aylmer.
They call upon Parliament to consider an amendment to the Criminal Code to prevent the distribution in Canada of violent and degrading material like the serial killer board game.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
Charles A. Langlois: Mr. Speaker, Question No. 458 will be answered today.


Mr. Arseneault: With respect to Canada Post's operation of the Pointe-Verte post office in New Brunswick for the past five years, (a) was the post office operating at a surplus or a deficit for the outlined period, (b) what studies, reports and/or reviews have been carried out by the Canada Post Corporation on the operation of the Pointe-Verte post office?


Harvie Andre: (a) The
costs of operating an individual post office include both direct and indirect costs. Direct costs include the salaries and benefits of all employees, rural route costs, and the accommodation costs for the premises occupied by the office. Indirect costs include the portion of the highway service truck delivery costs, the costs to process the mail in downstream mail processing plants, the costs of delivering the mail generated in the office, the portion of the cost of the corporate infrastructure and overhead, or the portion of the capital costs of purchasing new equipment to process and deliver the mail, or to develop new technology. The direct costs only of operating the Pointe Verte post office are more than two times the revenue generated.
(b) The corporation has reviewed the mail processing and delivery activities of the office, the need for the office in the network, the distance to neighbouring communities, the relative size of the community, the nature of its business base, the number of customers served, the existing modes of mail delivery, the remaining complement of employees, the suitability of the building, the costs to operate the building, demographics and shopping patterns, and the relative costs of alternate services.


Charles A. Langlois: Mr. Speaker, if Question No. 405 could be made an Order for Return, the return would be tabled immediately.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House that Question No. 405 be deemed to have been made an Order for Return?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Mr. Althouse: With respect to the Farm Credit Corporation (a) sales and rental agreements (i) what are the land location numbers, name of previous owners and name of new owners or lessees, (ii) what is the closing date used for each parcel of land offered and the date that the deal was closed on each transaction, (b) rules applied in presenting tenders for the sale or lease of lands (i) does FCC have appraisals done by third parties in determining the asking price on properties offered for sale, (ii) are closing dates adhered to, (iii) can more than one bid be submitted and can bids be submitted after the closing date for bids, (iv) who is present at the opening of bids, (v) does anyone represent the current or former owner, (vi) when are the names, addresses and bids of the winning bidders made public?
Return tabled.


Charles A. Langlois: I ask, Mr. Speaker, that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Shall the remaining questions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Bevilacqua.
Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to participate in the debate today, although I must say that when I read the motion put forward by my hon. friend I cannot help but wonder what world he is living in.
It ignores the facts at home and it ignores the facts abroad. It takes what I guess Canadians are coming to see as a typical Liberal approach to policy. There is no substance. They chase the polls, pretend to be in favour of whatever seems to be popular, are against absolutely everything and criticize every initiative taken by anyone else.
Consider this business of pretending that we are still mired in a recession when clearly we are starting to come out of it. There is no question that we have been through a tough recession. The whole world has been through it but things are turning around and Canada is well postured to come out of it.
Furthermore, I might say that it is interesting to note our recovery is export driven by the trade policies put in place by this government, every single one of which the Liberal Party opposed. Is that not interesting?
We hear them talk about all the terrible things going on. Let us check the record. Let us look at what is going on in the country today. The unemployment rate dropped in February from January. The help wanted index rose by four points in February. The composite leading indicator was up 0.7 per cent. That is a huge jump and a good sign of robust growth over the next few months. They scoff on the other side but these are the facts. We have to deal with the facts as they are, not as they wish were.
Housing starts in February jumped 6 per cent over that in January. Exports in January 1993 set another record. We sold $14.6 billion of goods and services to the world,
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which is more than we sold previously in the history of this country.
In 1992 exports set an all-time high and were up 11.2 per cent from 1991. The inflation rate in February 1993 was only 2.3 per cent. That is not bad when we compare it with a 12.9 per cent inflation rate that the Liberals left us when they left power.
Our workers are more productive. Statistics Canada reports said that labour productivity has had its best rate in almost 10 years. In 1992 output per person was us 2.3 per cent. We are coming out of this recession. We are well postured and we are well positioned to deal with the changes going on in the world.
Why? It is simply because the government has had the foresight and the courage to put things in place. The world is changing whether my hon. friends opposite want to know it or not. In fact one of our colleagues here, the hon. member for Halton-Peel, has recently published a very excellent book. I want to give him a plug. He looks ahead and talks about some of the things that are going to happen in the future. I would recommend this book to all my colleagues for their reading.
Here are a few of the principles that he sees as he looks ahead: a lot more globalization, success to those who are competitive, competitive pressures to reduce taxes and lessen regulations, more efficient government, pressure to control government spending, more economic restructuring, changing demographies, and it goes on.
Whether my hon. friends opposite want to acknowledge it or not, the world is changing and Canada must change to align itself with the changes in the world so that Canadians will be able to benefit and have a level of prosperity such as they never experienced before as we head into the 21st century.
That is precisely what underwrites the economic plan of this government set forth in November 1984 when it first came into office.
It is interesting to reflect on that performance over the last eight and a half years. There has been a five-part program. These are not ad hoc random happenings that have gone on. There is a clear structure and a plan to prepare Canada to be competitive in the 21st century. It has included a program of deficit control. Interestingly enough, every deficit control measure that has been


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brought in since I have been here has been opposed by our friends on the other side who have now become the apostles of deficit control. Is that not interesting?
Tax restructuring has made our Canadian manufacturers more competitive, difficult though it was to go through. I notice my hon. friends scoff. I notice they opposed the restructuring but they have absolutely no idea what they would put in its place.
New trade agreements have provided market access for our exports. Twenty-five per cent of the jobs in this country are dependent upon exports, and one needs somewhere to export to. Our friends across the way would get rid of our various trade agreements. I do not know where they propose to trade without them.
There are privatization and reduction in the size of government. Each of these measures has been opposed by the other side, yet those are the things that have taken
60,000	to 70,000 people off the payroll of the Canadian taxpayers.
There are industrial adjustment programs. Obviously structural changes in the economy impact directly on people. That is why the government has brought in the labour force development strategy the elements of which, once again, were opposed by the other side. It has taken a passive approach to handing out money to people and turned it into an active approach in terms of unemployment insurance. It not only provided interim support for people but provided opportunities for them to train themselves so they will be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that exist as we head into the 21st century.
These programs have been targeted at improving productivity. I just quoted a figure a moment ago on how Canadian productivity has gone up. Improving productivity, quite simply, means enhancing our competitiveness and enabling us to take advantage of those opportunities.
The strategy is clearly working when we look at the growth in jobs. There are 118,000 more people employed in Canada today when compared with a year ago. Clearly it is working. One of the manifestations is when we look at the growth in trade surpluses. Clearly I am sure that if
my hon. friends opposite reflect soberly they will realize that actually these initiatives have done a great deal.
I know my time is limited, but I would like to focus on the trade area, some of the initiatives that the government has taken, the impact of those initiatives, and where we are going from here.
Trade agreements provide opportunities. Results come when firms, businesses and workers take advantage of those opportunities. If we are going to take a look at the free trade agreement and assess its results, and if we are going to look at the potential that NAFTA offers us, we have to look at them for what they are and not for what they are not. We cannot throw up a bunch of smokescreens and simply go out and try to terrorize or scare Canadians.
I remember in 1988 when the Liberals and the NDP went around and told everybody they were going to lose medicare; they were going to lose this and they were going to lose that. Well, guess what? Four and a half years later what do we have to show for the free trade agreement? Our exports have gone up dramatically in Canada. We still have medicare and we still have our social programs.
The free trade agreement should not be confused with the recession in terms of its impact on the economy. The recession has devastated our economy in many respects. Let us face it, but let us try not to play the game, as I heard from some speakers earlier in this debate, by saying: "Ah well, every job that has been lost has nothing to do with the recession, it has everything to do with the free trade agreement".
I quoted a number of eminent authorities earlier today in responding to one of my hon. friends, but just for their benefit since I see a number of Liberal members in the House let me quote from one of the most reputable Liberal sources in the country, The Toronto Star. What did The Toronto Star have to say about the free trade agreement? Let me quote from The Toronto Star of February 7, 1993: "Far from creating the recession the FTA has softened its effect. The recession has been global and coincided with the fundamental restructuring of the world's economy. Critics too often attribute the effects of both the recession and restructuring to the


demon FTA when without the FTA and those increased exports Canada's recession would only have been worse and restructuring more difficult".
If my hon. friends in the Liberal Party are not going to accept the gospel according to The Toronto Star then the universe is really not unfolding as it normally does.
Let us take a look at the evidence and the facts on what the impact of free trade agreement has been. A recent study by the C.D. Howe Institute shows that since the FTA Canada's trade balance with the United States has improved more than its trade balance with other regions. The C.D. Howe study also shows it is in those sectors liberalized by the FTA that exports have increased the most, in particular those in non-resource based manufacturing.
Total merchandise exports to the U.S. have increased to record levels since the FTA. From $102.6 billion in 1988 exports reached $122 billion in 1992. This is a 19.2 per cent increase in four years. Exports in 1992 increased
13.6	per cent over 1991. Canada's merchandise trade surplus with the United States was $17.7 billion, a 27.3 per cent increase over 1991. In December alone Canada's trade surplus with the United States increased by $411 million to a record $1.96 billion.
Those are pretty extraordinary figures and it is hard to say: "What does that mean for me as an individual?" What it means quite simply is that exports mean jobs. If our Canadian companies are to continue to grow and prosper they have to be able to compete where the markets are. If we are to try to shelter our Canadian workers from the rest of the world then quite simply there is not going to be an opportunity to sell in those markets. We have to be competitive.
Clearly the FTA has contributed to our competitiveness. I noticed in January 1993 our exports to the United States were 23 per cent higher than in the same month only a year earlier.
Another impact of the FTA has been the sharp increase in foreign direct investment into Canada since it was implemented, clearly showing confidence in the Canadian economy and in the government's structural reforms. Investors from all over the world know, and indeed Canadian investors know it, they can invest in factories and the expansion of businesses in Canada and that they have access to the largest market in the world in the United States.
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Investments quite simply means jobs. The growth of investment that has been the direct result of the FTA clearly has been beneficial. Our exports to the U.S. are setting record levels. Our merchandise trade surplus with the U.S. is at record levels. All this has had a positive effect on job creation with a net increase, as I said earlier, of 118,000 new jobs more than in the previous year.
That is performance. That is the outcome of the FTA. What does the Conference Board of Canada say about the FTA? "Free trade critics are confusing the facts. They are blaming the FTA for job losses that are attributable to a variety of other economic circumstances such as the recession. There is also evidence that the FTA, rather than hurting the economy, may have actually offset some of the damage that the recession has done to the Canadian economy today".
I could go on and on. I have a lot of quotes here that I would be pleased to read into the record for the benefit of my hon. friends, but I think the point is clearly and unequivocally made. The fact is that the free trade agreement is doing for Canada exactly what it was supposed to do, creating economic opportunities and creating jobs.
When this recession is fully behind us there is absolutely no question that the Canadian economy is going to be booming as never before.
Now we are moving into the next step, the North American free trade agreement, which has been signed and which adds another 85 million people, creating the largest market area in the world with Mexico, Canada and the United States.
It builds on the FTA. It is interesting to note a number of features of the NAFTA. Already I hear my colleagues opposite, particularly my friends in the New Democratic Party who seem to be out to convince the entire world that NAFTA is going to put them out of business and make them all unemployed.
It is interesting to note with respect to the NAFTA the auto pact remains the same. Agriculture will see some barriers removed to the export of Canadian goods into Mexico. Yet our supply management system for poultry and dairy remains untouched, exactly the same, protecting the food supply of Canadians and protecting Canadian farmers.


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It preserves the FTA exception for cultural industries. I remember all the talk in 1988 about culture and about how the door was being opened when culture was not in there. Culture is not in the NAFTA either.
Health and social services remain fully protected. Canadian government policy prohibiting large scale export of water is unaffected as well. We have heard talk about that. If it is bottled and manufactured then it can be exported. That is the limit on it and has been the case up to now.
Of course it provides market opportunities for Canadians in the area of natural gas exports. What is the impact on the environment? We are hearing a fair bit of talk about that because of the bilateral discussions that are going on. It is interesting to note that the NAFTA itself contains more provisions relating to the environment than any other trade agreement ever signed in the history of the world. There is a strong commitment to sustainable development and to environmental protection.
Countries may maintain their own environmental standards. There is absolutely nothing in the NAFTA that will bring down the environmental standards that Canadians insist upon as the basis for government in our society. It prohibits the reduction of standards in health and safety as well as in the environment that attract investments. There is going to be a procedure to observe that.
As we know there are parallel discussions going on. People seem to be suggesting that because parallel discussions have been started on the environment and labour as cases in point, there is nothing happening with respect to the environment.
I want to point out, to use a word raised by the House leader of the Liberal Party earlier today, nothing could be more erroneous than that suggestion. Canada put the suggestion on the table one year ago that we should look at further enhancing environmental predictions through trilateral discussions. With the change of government in the United States the Americans are being more responsive. Some people would suggest we are taking the cues from the Americans with respect to the environment.
There is no country in the world that has the enviable reputation of this country in terms of its record with the environment. We saw that at the onset at the United Nations conference on environment and development last June in Rio when Canada was looked to as the delegation that was providing leadership in the world in the area of sustainable development and in the area of the environment. Our green plan was looked upon as a model to be followed by all nations.
We as a government welcome the new increased interest that the new American government has in terms of environmental protection. We are absolutely delighted to have an opportunity to sit down to discuss further enhancing protection of the environment.
As well, I might say there should be no misconceptions about what the impact of collateral discussions on the NAFTA itself. President Clinton has made it very clear it is the intention of his government that NAFTA will go ahead on schedule, unchanged. It will not be reopened. It will go ahead on schedule on January 1, 1994. Hopefully by that time we will have these side agreements as well.
As with NAFTA there will be full consultations with all affected groups, with provincial governments, with business and labour groups and so on, so that the opportunities presented to Canadians through those discussion to have their input will be there, as it has been before. What is important about NAFTA is what the Government of Canada wanted to get out of these negotiations and what in fact we achieved through these negotiations. We hear a lot of talk in the House about Mexicans but as far as this government is concerned its primary concern is what is best for Canada.
We headed into those NAFTA discussions with the interests of Canada in mind. Essentially there were three objectives set forth by the Government of Canada. The first was access to the Mexican market, to gain access for Canadian goods, services and capital to Mexico, one of the fastest growing and most promising economies in the world, on an equal footing with the United States.


Clearly these discussions between the U.S. and Mexico were going to happen. If there was a bilateral agreement between the U.S.A and Mexico on the one hand and a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Canada on the other, one does not have to be a genius to figure out where the investment is going to go. The investment is going to go to the United States.
By being part of a trilateral agreement we have the opportunity to enhance investment in this country. That was an objective we sought. That was an objective we have achieved.
Second was to improve and protect the FTA, to resolve trade problems with the United States that had occurred during the past few years while ensuring no reduction in the benefits and obligations of the FTA.
The FTA was a complex document negotiated over many months and brought into place on January 1,1989. Naturally as with any document of that magnitude there would be some chinks in the armour and some little problems that had to be worked out. The NAFTA negotiations provided us with an opportunity to put on the table the concerns of Canada as a government with the way the FTA was working, for example things like the establishment of Canadian content in automobiles. Things like that were sorted out in the NAFTA. The second objective was achieved.
Third and finally was our aspiration to see that Canada remained an attractive location for investment. Obviously investment is the key to growth. By being part of this large North American market of 350 million people Canada now has a marvellous basis for the attraction of investment from abroad, the result of which is going to be more jobs for Canadians and the opportunity to maintain the high standard of living we have.
In conclusion I must say when I reflect on the motion put forward by the hon. member opposite I really think it is time for him to go back to the drawing-board. I hope he will listen to the speech delivered earlier today by my hon. friend, the Minister of State for Finance and Privatization, who dealt with a number of fiscal matters. I hope he will listen to what I said on trade. I look forward to the rest of the debate. I trust my hon. friend on reflection will realize that perhaps this government is doing an outstanding job and should be sustained as it will be at the next general election.
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Mr. Rey Pagtakhan (Winnipeg North):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a couple of comments and then pose a question to the hon. member.
He indicated that he was disputing the essence of the motion, that there is stifled economic growth. How would the hon. member respond to the concern of the youth around the country who say they have lost hope in this government? When they graduated with skills they could not find jobs. They also fear the skills they have today may not be relevant tomorrow.
Would the hon. member respond to the specific question of whether he would favour the establishment of a national apprenticeship program and the creation of a Canadian youth service to address the very emergent concerns of youth about unemployment and their future?


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond to my hon. friend's question.
We can dress these programs up in any kind of fabric we want but the bottom line is that what is best for the youth of Canada is a strong economy. A strong economy where there is economic growth, an economy in which there are incentives for investors, will mean the establishment of manufacturing enterprises and that is going to mean job opportunities.
Job opportunities and the economic growth that would spring from them are exactly what young people are looking for today.
We have benefited for many years from a high quality of education in this country. Right now our education systems are challenged as never before, challenged in part because they are looked upon to accept responsibility for all the social evils of society and the difficult problems that kids bring to school, challenged also by the level of resources available to them. Government restraint is popular in principle but when it means not providing the growth in expenditures that may be expected, whether in youth programs, education, transfer programs to the provinces or whatever, they are difficult to cope with.
In the long run the best thing we can do for young people is not burden them with the debt of our past but ensure we have a strong economy that will provide them with the jobs and the opportunities they are looking for in the future.


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Ron Fisher: Mr. Speaker, I must agree with the concluding statements of the member opposite, although I would put a slightly different interpretation on them. He said the government could not be accused of not working as hard as it could. It certainly is working as hard as it can to distort the effects of what has happened as a result of the free trade agreement.
I was referring this morning to the very expensive tabloid the government sent to every household in the country. It said that since the free trade agreement no country has been able to take a larger share of the U.S. market for manufactured goods than Canada. As a matter of fact the U.S. commerce department's figures, obviously different figures from what the government is using, point out it is from simply not the case.
Japan had the largest share increase in manufactured imports both before and after the FTA was implemented. As a matter of fact Australia, Mexico and South Africa had a larger percentage of growth in imports into the United States than Canada, and they do not have a free trade agreement with the United States either. There certainly is a lot of distortion there. I am at a loss to understand why the government would tty to convince us otherwise.
I would like to come back to a statement that the member made the other day in relation to the free trade agreement. He said that as Canadians we must take down this wall of high wage protection we have put around ourselves and get ourselves reintroduced to the real world.
There seems to be a tremendous amount of concern on the government side for the workers in Mexico and great praise for the free trade agreement and how much it is going to do for them. The Maquiladora sections of Mexico have had free trade for 20 years. The Mexican workers who work in that area of Mexico are suffering from lower wages than the workers in the rest of Mexico.
I ask the hon. member how on earth he can extrapolate from the evidence that either the Canadians or the Mexican workers will be better off under the North American free trade agreement.


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, if my hon. friend from Saskatoon-Dundurn really thinks that South Africa
represents serious competition for trade with the United States then I suggest he has a very creative way of looking at the growth of trade in the world.
Let us deal with the point that he makes about wages. I know he takes everything I say as gospel, but just on the off chance that he might be a little bit suspicious let me read from another source, an expert in this area, the Business Council on National Issues, which I know he will recognize as a very reputable source. The council states: "Low wages are just not a main source of competitive advantage for the knowledge intensive industries that play an ever larger role in modern economies. If low wages were the key to investment decisions the poorer regions of Canada and the United States would account for disproportionate shares of domestic business investment. In fact relatively low wage regions of both Canada and the United States generally receive disproportionately smaller shares of business investment including manufacturing investment".
My friend talks about the Maquiladora, which represents about 2 per cent of the manufacturing economy of Mexico. We are dealing with a very unique circumstance in terms of those free trade zones to which he refers. He and his colleague from Nanaimo-Cowichan would have the entire country think that all future manufacturing in North America is to be done in the Maquiladora of Mexico.
The reality of the situation is that our international competitors are not low wage countries. They are Europe, the United States, and Japan. The same thing applies. What is significant is the cost of production and productivity, not just the price of labour.
Mexican cost of labour is less, on average seven and a half times less than the price of labour in Canada. On the other hand productivity of Canadian workers is six and a half times higher. Access to capital in this country is also considerably higher. The productivity of capital technology is higher in this country. That is why Canadians can compete. My friends in the labour movement and the NDP should not be afraid of Canadians they should take pride in what Canadians can do. It will be a success story just as the FTA has been.


Mr. Maurice Foster (Algoma):: Mr. Speaker, I listened to the hon. member for South Shore with great interest. He seemed to be saying that the NAFTA was a great step forward in helping the supply management sector, helping trade and so on.
I wonder if the hon. member could explain exactly why the government failed to get a subsidy code and an anti-dumping code the free trade deal when it was renegotiating under NAFTA. Taking into account all the problems we have had with the steel industry, with the hog and pork industry, all the trade dispute problems that the Prime Minister said would be solved by the FTA, it did not make arrangements to have a subsidy code so there would not be any future countervail duties against Canadian products being sold to the United States? Why did we not make arrangements for a countervail duty code so that everybody would know? Since every other free trade deal in the world, whether it is the European Economic Community group or the Australasian group or the New Zealand-Australia free trade deal, has these arrangements why did this government not-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Order, please. There is one minute remaining in the comments or questions period.


Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I could hardly do justice to such a complex question in one minute but I will try the best I can.
The important thing is that we do have a dispute settlement mechanism, in fact we have two of them in a general way in chapter eighteen and more specifically in chapter nineteen, which is definitive and inclusive.
As for the subsidy definition issue obviously it would be desirable to sort it out but the two parties have not been able to come to an agreement. What is important about the FTA and about NAFTA is what we have come to an agreement on.
My hon. friend talks about agriculture. I remind him again that the supply managed sector in Canada is fully protected under the FTA and again under NAFTA. If he thinks it is such a bad deal for farmers then he should talk to the pork producers. He should hear what they think about the FTA and the mechanism for resolving disputes which have served Canadians so well and so effectively and which we would not have without the FTA.
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Dennis Joseph Mills: I am
happy to have an opportunity to participate in this debate. The motion put forward by my colleague from York North was:
That this House condemn the government for its policies that
have stifled economic growth, destroyed Canadian jobs and
exacerbated the recession.
My colleague left out one very important point in his motion when he talked about destroying Canadian jobs. There is one sector of the economy of this country that has grown, and that is the lobbyist sector. Under this government the lobbyists have managed successfully to influence and assist in this government's policy in a most destructive way for the past seven or eight years. I do not think Canadians today realize just what a force the lobbyist industry has been on this government.
Another area that has grown under this government is the area of the underground cash economy. There are experts today who would suggest that the underground economy in this country is worth over $100 billion.
There is a professor at the University of British Columbia, W.E. Diewert, who said that before the GST the underground economy was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $80 billion and since the GST it has been exacerbated and is now in excess of $100 billion.
When this government stands up today to defend its record I wonder what planet it will be on. When we go home to our ridings on the weekends or during breaks we run into people day in and day out who are without jobs, young people who are just graduating and cannot even get interviews because there is not even an opportunity. We talk about small businesses that are hanging on by their fingernails, and the government stands today and quotes its record and its statistics.
During the next election the central issue in the campaign is going to be one of trust, government members are going to be one of trust. Govemement members are going to be saying "Trust us to stay the course". I cannot believe that the people of Canada will accept that, and it will not matter who the new leader is. It will not matter if it is the minister for small businesses, the Minister of National Defence or the member for Cambridge. The bottom line is they are going to run on their record of the last nine years.


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This is a government that took office in 1984, talked about tax reform and then proceeded to install 32 tax increases, including this poorly designed GST, at the worst time in our economic history in terms of a downturn. The government crushed the confidence of the community at the retail level. It taxed books. It put a tax on cold pizza but not on warm pizza. It will not matter who the Conservative leader is because that GST is going to be on every doorstep morning, noon and night.
It was the same when we talked about the free trade agreement during the last debate. To this day I believe that the right hon. member for Vancouver Quadra won the free trade debate but Canadians were fooled by the foreign multinational advertising led by the Business Council on National Issues, another example of where the lobbyists came in and bought full-page ads and radio ads and fooled Canadians with third party advertising. I pray this time Canadians will not be duped again.
Today there is this big media hype about the Minister of National Defence, a person who has rarely given a speech in the House of Commons. We do not know really what she stands for, but at the same time there is this media hype around the country saying that she is the answer to all that ails us. Yet at the same time she has been part and parcel of every decision that has taken place in this House for the last five years. She was there for the GST. She is there for the helicopters.
I do not believe for a minute that Canadians are going to stand by and just say that they want another four years of Conservative rule and that they want another four years in which, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada, there are 2.2 million people receiving welfare and 1.5 million people on unemployment insurance. Last year we spent close to $35 billion on welfare and unemployment insurance and the interest on those costs.
Speaking constructively about an idea that the government came up with just before Christmas, the Small Businesses Loans Act, we all know the greatest hope for new job creation lies with small business. The Small Businesses Loans Act was a good idea that the government bad, but once again it has managed to screw even that up. It is unbelievable what it can do to a good idea. It thinks that Canadians are stupid. It was an idea that was
announced in December to put some cash, some capital back into the hands of small business because that is where the job creation potential is and that is where our greatest hope is.
Here we are pushing April and we still do not have the message out to small businesses. I have said it in this House for the last three months. I keep begging the government to communicate this idea, advertise this idea. What does it do?
It has no sense of urgency. It does not realize that the bank manager will come knocking on the door saying: "Hey, your mortgage payments are behind" or "Mr. Small Businessman, your overdraft is unacceptable. We are not going to help you any more".
The government does not understand the sense of urgency. It does not understand when people are out of work or are about to lose their homes or their jobs or their businesses, the slap in terms of personal dignity that takes place. It seems to coast along takes its time. I believe Canadians during the next election are going to remember the deep pain the government has inflicted on them.
I am not suggesting for a second that any party, any person has the magic answer or has the magic wand to correct a global recession. That is not where I am coming from. I am coming from a point that when people are in deep pain and are looking to their leaders to give them some hope, this government sort of throws up an idea but then takes its time in implementing it.
I know of small businessmen dealing with this government who have been waiting in some cases for a year and a half, up to two years, to get action on files that they requested of this government. This lack of urgency, this seeming indifference to people when they are in deep pain, is going to be this government's legacy when we go to the people over the next few months.
As I said, I do not think for a minute we have a flash answer to correct all that ails us. Throughout history even with the flaws in the Liberal Party, and I know from time to time we have incurred larger deficits and therefore caused more debt in this country's Treasury, the Liberals, if one goes back 50 years, have the greatest record for putting people back to work.


When I go door to door or store to store in my riding in the next election and they ask me what the Liberal Party stands for, I will tell them to look at our record over the last 50 years and they will see that Liberals put Canadians to work. Liberals create more jobs than any other party and, quite frankly, I would rather have a little bit of debt on the nation's Treasury but let Canadians have their dignity and have them working.


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker,
I see my hon. colleague wanted to speak. I will be brief. Maybe there will be time for him too.
My hon. friend says that Liberal governments put people to work. During the tremendous boom of 1985 to 1990 the Liberal Government of Ontario put people to work this way. It hired over 18,000 public servants. That is how it put people to work. In the middle of a boom it added to public servants.
We read last week that the NDP government in Ontario is to lay off 18,000 people.
Does he believe that the way to create jobs is to hire public servants? Is that the Liberal approach, because if it is, it is not the NDP approach it seems any more, or the Conservative approach.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe the minister put that question to me. He knows full well that it is not the approach of the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberal Party of Canada, and he knows this full well as I have said it in the House 150 times in the last three years, believes in entrepreneurship. The Liberal Party believes in small business.
There are over 960,000 small businesses in this country. Perhaps we could get the bill of the minister advertised and get the banks of Canada, instead of getting the CDIC to guarantee Edper, Campeau, Central Guaranty and the Royal Trustco, to help small business. He can find $10 billion for those people but he cannot find money to advertise to small business.
That is what is wrong with this government. We are not asking it to create a bureaucracy. We oppose red tape as much as anyone but we hate it ripping the heart and guts out of small business. The government is doing it by
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creating expectations with the Small Businesses Loans Act and not communicating the reality to the banks and the people that it is available.
When the minister talks about David Peterson and his Liberal Party hiring 18,000 public servants, I am not sure his facts are absolutely right. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he did hire them. During that period he also balanced the budget.


Mr. Pat Sobeski (Cambridge):: Mr. Speaker, I will be brief. The hon. member raises a valid point about the underground economy. It seems to me back in 1981 when we had our last recession we had electricians and others unemployed. It was quite common when we went into the Legion to have a beer to hear people talking about whether so-and-so could do a job for cash under the table.
What he suggests in 1991 was just as true in 1980. When he expresses concern about going in and talking about the Small Businesses Loans Act, does he not feel better knowing that businesses have a better chance? If we went back to 1981 the prime bank rate was 22 per cent. Today he has to say because of these Tories and Tory policies the bank rate is 6.75 per cent. That must make businessmen feel a little more assured.
What about the consumer he bumps into who 10 years ago, back in 1981, had a five-year mortgage rate at 21.75 per cent? How does he explain to them today the difficulty and that the rate is under 9 per cent? How does he match the two?


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I can respond to that quite easily. First of all, when we talk about the global recession that took place in 1980-81, the interest rates in the United States were close to 16.5 per cent and 17 per cent. Let us compare apples and apples.
The difference between 1981 and 1991 is that we had in our budget at that time a special recovery program. We did incur a little bit of debt to the Treasury but we built things. We built airports, things that we needed, non-optional use facilities. We built infrastructure because we would much rather pay people. We would much rather pay people to be out working with their hands and their minds than to give them a welfare cheque and have them sitting at home watching videos.


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Robert Daniel Nault: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to enter into this debate. I want to follow up on what my colleague has talked about in his opening remarks to the people of Canada.
One of the things that has concerned me the most as a member is the facade which the Conservative government is now putting up, that everything is good in the land. It says we had a recession. It was a world recession. It was not our fault. We could not do anything about it. We have a debt so therefore we do not have the capability of helping Canadians to find work and to get the economy working again.
The facade that is being portrayed in this House today has been portrayed out on the hustings for a number of months because an election is coming. It has to be put to rest. We have to get back to the debate that we are in today, concerning legitimate ideas from members of Parliament as to how we get 1.5 million Canadians back to work.
Before I give my suggestions, and allow the government to analyse them, I hope it will do something instead of spending its time trying to suggest to Canadians that things are great out there. Let me mention to the government opposite what has happened in the last few years.
In 1990 Canada's business community had 11,642 bankruptcies, 2,907 in Ontario alone. In 1991 Canada had 13,496 bankruptcies, Ontario had 3,629. In 1992 Canada had 14,317 bankruptcies, Ontario had 4,240. These are business bankruptcies. They are not personal bankruptcies, and the difficulties incurred with that issue. They are simply business bankruptcies.
I want to spend my time today talking about what the government should be doing to get people back to work. It should be dealing with ways of helping small business, getting governments off the backs of small business. In that way small businesses can start spending their time figuring out, imagining in their own minds and being creative, ways to create employment and of course to
make a profit for themselves in creating that employment that we are talking about.
I want to mention something that I got from a friend who is the new president of the Ontario Hotel-Motel Association. He gave me a list of regulatory hoops that a small business has to go through in order to start up a small business in Ontario. They call it the wall. In front of me I have a list of 42 regulatoiy agencies which a small business has to talk to before it can even open its doors. There are 42 different agencies in Ontario that an entrepreneur has to go and see before he can even attempt to make his first dollar.
Let me list them as quickly as I can. It is important for people to realize and not to be surprised that nobody in this country would even dare to start their own business given these kinds of situations.
Entrepreneurs have to see the municipal authority and check the by-laws. They have to look at the planning act, check the official plan and the zoning by-laws. They have to have a site plan control and deal with regional authorities, public works, policy statements, proposed wetlands policy, the Municipal Act, Building Code Act, Public Parks Act, Public Lands Act, Surveyor's Act and Surveys Act, Provincial Parks Act, Woodlands Improvement Act, Forestry Act, Crown Timbers Act, Trees Act, LLBO, Hotel Fire Marshall, Boards of Navigational Waters Act, Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act, Conservation Authorities Act, Wilderness Areas Act, Aggregate Resource Act, Fisheries Act, Endangered Species Act, Environmental Protection Act, Ontario Water Resources Act, Environmental Assessment Act, Public Health Act, Ontario Heritage Act, Foodland Guidelines, Farm Practices Protection Act, Off-Road Vehicles Act, Public Transportation Act, Highway Improvement Act, Public Service Works Act, Industrial Safety Act, Occupational Health and Safety Act.
Mr. Speaker, when you take a look at these regulatory agencies, can you imagine why no one in their right mind would want to start a business in Ontario or in Canada?


Dennis Joseph Mills: You have not even included the Income Tax Act.


Robert Daniel Nault: That is right. My colleague says we have not even included the GST and the nightmares the government has created for small business by having it be the government's private tax collector.
I have done what the minister opposite who intervened in my colleague's speech asked us to do. I sent a letter to the business community in Kenora-Rainy River. I am sure all members here have their business community on their computer. I sent businesses a little memo telling them about the Small Businesses Loans Act and how they should go to their local bank and ask them if they can take a look at this. I told them if they are having difficulties because of the very difficult recession we are in and they want to try and keep themselves going and get the kind of capital and investment they need to create employment and stay in business the federal government is prepared to help them by guaranteeing up to 90 per cent of a loan to small businesses.
I did that in good faith because the Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism said the government was really going to sell the Small Businesses Loans Act, it is a great thing. He is right. I want to help out and get our small businesses back to work so I sent this out to the businesses in my riding.
The phone started to ring minutes after people got this in the mail. They said: "This is great. We have got a program. I did not know this". They went to their bank and the banks did not know about it. The local bank managers in northern Ontario kept telling the small business community: "Oh, that is interesting. Small Businesses Loans Act. I do not know anything about that.


An hon. member:: It's a true story.


Robert Daniel Nault: No wonder small businesses are going bankrupt in this country with the kind of banking establishment they have to do deals with.
I am now presently researching how to create a northern Ontario regional bank because we really are in desperate trouble in northern Ontario.
The member opposite grins and shakes his head and laughs. However, if one tries to get a loan in northern Ontario one will see what it is like. Even in the best of times in northern Ontario some individual from Toronto calls them up and says there is a depressed area in northern Ontario. It is about the size of Nova Scotia or
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New Brunswick but it is a depressed area. One does not loan money up there.
That is so even if there are people such as those on my list who have been in business for 10 and 11 years and have been very successful and who are looking for some help during a very difficult time. One individual here owns her own business and all the property that is involved with it. She does not have a loan whatsoever. She asked for a line of credit and she was turned down. They would not take her property because the bank in Toronto the big guys in Toronto, said that Rainy River was a depressed area. One cannot lend money there.
That is my point. My point is that we either have to change the system or tell the banking community that it had better get its act together or we will have no choice but to do something about it.
I tried to find out what the banking community was up to. I have a very good friend in the riding who is a fairly wealthy businessman. He got a letter the other day from his bank, which is the Royal Bank. I cannot say who the gentleman is or what his financial situation is but I know personally that he is quite wealthy and owns a lot of property.
The bank sent him a letter the other day suggesting that he had a problem. He was a bad risk. He was simply amazed. They told him that they were going to change his monthly service charge and his current interest rates, which were prime plus one and a half per cent, to prime plus four per cent. He could not figure out why.
Then he checked with some people in the banks who are little higher up and learned they have changed their policies now. We have been told that businesses have now been put into three categories: class A, class B and class C.
I do not have too much time, but class C includes pretty well 90 per cent of the businesses that give the banks less than $300,000 in service charges, interest carrying charges, fees and other extras. If those businesses give the banks less than $300,000 a year and they are in class C they have to pay prime plus four per cent.
I can understand now what has happened. We would never get anybody to admit this in the banking establishment but these are the changes they have made. We have no choice in this House but to either enact legislation to make these banks allow businesses to create wealth in this country or else we will all be looking


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for a place to hang our hat next election because this country cannot survive under that kind of situation.
In my short time I hope I have outlined to the minister what is really going on in northern Ontario. We had better do something about it.


Patrick (Pat) Anthony Sobeski: Mr. Speaker, I will be brief. The hon. gentleman talked about some 14,000 business bankruptcies in Canada. I think he would also be interested to know that just in Los Angeles county in the United States last year there were some 14,000 business bankruptcies.
While the hon. member suggests that only in Canada are we experiencing business bankruptcies, it is also true south of the border.
It is a very simple question. I listened very carefully to the hon. member's comments. It seems to me now that the Liberal policy is the nationalization of the Canadian banking system.
I just want to ask the hon. member if he could please clarify if it is the policy of the Liberal Party to nationalize the Canadian banking system?


Robert Daniel Nault: I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, but I cannot help but laugh at the member opposite because he has basically trivialized people's lives.


An hon. member:: He is probably another Kim Campbell puppy dog.


Robert Daniel Nault: I cannot understand this. We have record bankruptcies in this country and tremendous problems. This is a very serious debate in the highest institution of the land and the member stands up and asks me a silly question as to whether I would be as dumb as the NDP and nationalize the banks.
I am not talking about that at all. What I am talking about is the fact that the banking establishments in this country can loan the Reichmanns billions of dollars without checking their credit rating. Look at the O&Y fiasco before our eyes. However, these institutions will not even give somebody in my riding a $10,000 loan even if he has the best credit rating, owns his own home and is prepared to put that up as collateral and owns the property that the business is being run on. Now he asks
me a silly question about whether I want to have the banks controlled by the government.
I will tell him what I want. I have checked this out. There is absolutely no regulation that prevents a particular region in this country from setting up a regional bank. It is perfectly within the regulations and the act as it applies today. What I have been trying to find out is whether I could be proactive enough to convince the Ontario government to change the act as it relates to the credit unions because the Ontario government controls that particular act. If I cannot do I want to find out if there would be another mechanism in order for small businesses to get some loans.
Does the member opposite not think that a regional bank can be created under schedule A? He should take a look at the banking act to see that under schedule A one has to have so many people involved in creating this bank who are investors. This is a private enterprise system. It would have its own board from northern Ontario so I do not have to have somebody from Toronto tell me that Kenora-Rainy River is a depressed area. I want to put it back into our hands as northerners. We know best how to run northern Ontario and we will create the wealth for which we have been waiting a long time.
I want to tell the member for Cambridge how long northern Ontario has waited for the rest of Ontario to take it seriously. We have waited a long time. The Minister of State for Small Businesses of course gives us this regional development program called FEDNOR.


Patrick (Pat) Anthony Sobeski: Are you going to do away with FEDNOR?


Robert Daniel Nault: Well, Pat, just relax. I will tell the member exactly what I think of FEDNOR if he does not get his shorts in a knot. Just relax. The fact remains that FEDNOR has not created the diversification of the north that it was intended to do.
The real problem in northern Ontario is that the banking establishment has left us completely out in the cold. FEDNOR can fool around on the fringes all it likes. We appreciate the hand-out. It is a very nice thing to get a little hand-out, but Canadians and northerners are very tired of being the poor cousins of southern Ontario. We want some control over our own destiny and if the banking establishment in Toronto does not want to


give it to us then we will create it ourselves by creating our own banking institutions in northern Ontario.


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker,
I would like the hon. member who has just spoken to stay for a minute so I can respond to a couple of his comments and also to those of his colleague. I respect both of them very much and they are interested in these subjects so I am going to try to respond to what they have said in the last 10 or 15 minutes because they are asking serious questions.
I will address northern Ontario first because as the minister responsible for FEDNOR and as a minister for small business I think one of the real pleasures of that job was to be in charge of FEDNOR and to see that $60 million program in the last five years go into northern Ontario and create thousands of jobs in over 105 different communities.
The beauty of this program is that it supplements bank lending and private financing. I am surprised to hear the hon. member speak disparagingly of it. It usually levers the banks to do things they would not do.
I think he makes a good point. Northern Ontario has always had difficulty with getting chartered banks to pay attention and to give small businesses access to credit. That has been an historic problem for about 100 years. It is less of a problem now because of FEDNOR. In 400 different cases, it has levered bank lending that would never be there if FEDNOR was not there.
I ask the member to not say he does not want FEDNOR because that would have shut down those 400 things from happening and 105 different communities have benefited from the program.


An hon. member:: He did not say that.


Thomas Hockin: I want to speak to my friend's more telling point which is that banks generally are not lending to small and medium sized enterprises. I want to thank his party and I want to thank the NDP which helped too. There was tremendous work by caucus members on our side who helped us get the Small Businesses Loans Act through the House of Commons two weeks ago. On Thursday it will have third reading in the Senate and will
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receive royal assent. The hon. member wants us to advertise this program before it is passed.


An hon. member:: You have done that for nine years.


Thomas Hockin: The hon. member says that we have done it for nine years. He wants us to advertise the program with all the details, all the regulations and all the amendments even before it has passed the Senate. We cannot do that.
I want to tell my hon. friends, the members for Kenora-Rainy River and Broadview-Greenwood, that I respect their impatience about publicizing this. I want their ideas on how to do it.
Here is what we are going to do as soon as the bill passes on Thursday because I think everyone is interested in what we are going to do. We are going to put together a massive advertising campaign with the banks, and independent of the banks, right across Canada.
The second thing we are going to do is to make sure within the next month that all the lending officers in every bank branch-and we want the caisses de depot and the credit unions as well-are given a course on what the new SBLA is and what it amounts to so that they can be au courant.
I quite agree with the member for Kenora-Rainy River when he says that if one goes into a bank today in Kenora and ask about the SBLA then they are thinking of the old SBLA and not the new one.


An hon. member:: They do not know about it at all.


Thomas Hockin: That is probably true too because they did not like the old one. It did not give them what they wanted and it was a program that the Liberals had put in place from 1980 to 1984 and that we changed in certain ways. Both what we did and what they did was not enough to lever more than $400 million worth of lending last year.
We are now told by the banks that with these changes that we have made to the SBLA-my hon. friend supports these changes-we are going to have over $1 billion worth of business in the next year alone.
How are they going to do that if they do not promote it? How are they going to do it if they do not advertise it? How are they going to do it without training? This is


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what the program will be. I look forward to having help from members of Parliament to help us advertise this.
I think everybody in the House is interested in this subject. They can do a lot for their constituents. It might help them all get re-elected if they tell all the small businesses on Main Street in their riding about the SBLA.
What is new about the SBLA, this innocuous sounding little bill, the Small Businesses Loans Act? Everybody goes to sleep when we say the words. Let me say, that it is the most exciting piece of legislation to pass this House in this session of Parliament. I think we provisioned $40 million for loan losses under this program and we are going to lever $1 billion worth of activity.
By the way, in contrast to the NDP government in Ontario we are spending $1 billion directly to create jobs. It is creating 8,000 jobs in one case and 800 in another. This is much smarter spending. By using a loan guarantee scheme of $40 million one can get the banks to put $1 billion up instead of us. That is what SBLA is.
Why are the banks interested this time around? I want my friend from Kenora-Rainy River to listen carefully to why it is different. The guarantee has been raised from 85 per cent to 90 per cent. If there is a loss under this loan the banks pick up 10 per cent of the loss and the federal government picks up 90 per cent of the loss. This is a very big enticement.
Second, we have increased their commission. They had a 1 per cent commission under the old bill. This is a problem. They had to do a lot of paper work. We have increased the commission to one and three-quarters per cent on the understanding that they market the devil out of this thing, promote it and train for it. This was a very good point by my hon. friend, the member for Broadview-Greenwood. That is where the commission is.
We have done those two things for financial institutions. That means they are going to put this Small Businesses Loans Act in the window and promote it. If they do not we should make sure they hear from us. That is what we did for the banks, but what did we do for the small business people?
First, we got interest rates down to the lowest level they have been in 35 years. The other thing we have done for them under this act is we have said: "Look, no more". If they get a Small Businesses Loans Act where the federal government is guaranteeing most of it the banks would still ask people for their house, car and cottage and all that personal security and collateral to cover their 10 per cent exposure or 15 per cent exposure. We are saying in this bill that is unacceptable and the financial institutions cannot do it.
All they can ask to cover their 10 per cent exposure is for their signatures giving their personal security for 25 per cent of the loan. That is all they can ask for that. They cannot register any assets against it or anything like that. It is simply their personal security with their signatures based on their cash flow or salary. They cannot register any title against it.
What does this mean? It is very significant. This means that if they do not ask for their house, car and all their other belongings on top of the loan guarantee their collateral can be used to finance working capital. It could be used to finance accounts receivable, inventory and work in progress. This has always been the problem. They say they can never get a loan for working capital because their collateral was all tied up when they bought their truck or factory.
This particular act will be very effective in levering all sorts of economic activity that would never happen before. I cannot be too enthusiastic about it. I cannot agree more with my hon. friends that we should really market it, really promote it. I want to stand in the House and be criticized any day after next Thursday if this is not happening, but please do not ask us to advertise it and market it before it is passed because the regulations might change, the amendments might change it. On Thursday we will know and then off we go to the races. Maybe we should pass a bill through the House giving us $5 million to sell this because it is something we really should do.
We are talking to the opposition motion about the economy. The reason small business is important is that 80 per cent of all new jobs created in Canada in the last 10 years have been created by companies with 50 employees or less.


Nobody knows this. People think jobs are created by great big auto companies or great big hospitals or great big something else. In fact that is not where jobs are being created any more. I was in Windsor last Monday when there was a $900 million announcement by Chrysler and not one new job was created. It is to maintain the work force of 4,200 on this van plant with that investment, but even Chrysler with a huge investment of $900 million is not creating any new jobs. It is just holding its own.
Where are the new jobs being created? They are being created by small and medium sized enterprises. Canada is a much more entrepreneurial country in 1993 than it was in 1973. I remember the first week I was elected in 1984. There was a great line-up of people who wanted things from their MP: they wanted passports, they wanted to get a relative in or whatever. I had 13 businessmen lined up waiting for some grant or subsidy from the government. I was appalled. Even our entrepreneurs were not entrepreneurial in 1984. This country was becoming sick with its dependence on the state. Even entrepreneurs would not do something if the federal government did not give them a hand.
We still have regional programs for northern Ontario so there are still some small handouts, but generally we have downsized those programs and we are moving more smartly with this loan guarantee scheme through the Small Businesses Loans Act to make sure economic activity takes place.
There is something else about who these small business people are. Who are they anyway? I want to change the image of who they are. Fifty-two per cent of all new small businesses created since 1986 were created by females. I think 26 per cent in the last 10 years were created by new Canadians, first generation Canadians who started small businesses. The participation rate of women was very low in the sixties. Now it is 80 per cent and they are owning and operate businesses. It is a new phenomenon and new Canadians is a new phenomenon. The Vietnamese boat people all have jobs. They have small businesses. They are going gangbusters. It is the same with Koreans. It is the same with all sorts of new Canadians. This is a new reality that is giving power to our economy.
People say that this is fine, that we will have a whole lot of mini businesses but nobody can export or compete
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internationally if we just have small businesses. That is wrong. Washington Week said that is wrong. I opened 19 different companies this fall in southern Ontario that were expanding. They all had 100 employees or less and they all had three things in common.


Robert Daniel Nault: How many did you close, Tom?


Thomas Hockin: The member wants to hear that these things are happening. We do have net growth in the economy.
They had three things in common. First, they were exporting 80 per cent of what they were producing. Second, they had some new technology, a new piece of machinery that caught them up with everybody else or put them a little ahead. The third characteristic, which is kind of sad, was that they did not want anybody to know that they were doing well. They did not want any publicity.
I heard the other day that 80 per cent of all new jobs in Canada are never advertised. People do not want to advertise they are expanding. I asked to bring the television cameras and the media with me to cut the ribbon and I was told they just wanted me and no publicity. They say this because there is nothing in it for them to get a lot of publicity.
The point is good things are happening. It is hard to get that message out. It is small and medium sized enterprise that is growing and doing well.
There is something more to this motion than simply small business. It is the over-all climate that has been put in place for economic growth in Canada. I do not think the next election-I have some advice to give my opposition friends-will be about framework policies, trade agreements and tax reform. They were for the elections of 1984 and 1988. The next election is going to be community by community, town by town, main street by main street and about how job creation is being stimulated. That is really what the election is going to be about. We are not going to be talking about these great big issues any more.
Those frameworks are in place so it is going to be what will happen in the detailed way. In the detailed way community by community, street by street, company by company, it is our view in the federal government, the Conservative Party, we should not do it through excess subsidies. We should try to stimulate growth in more


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intelligent ways. Probably the best example is the Small Businesses Loans Act which will lever tremendous activity with very little federal government resources, just a lot of intelligence and good marketing.
Let me conclude with this point. In one quarter of 1992 the real GDP in Canada grew 1.4 per cent. It was the sixth consecutive quarter of growth and the strongest since the second quarter of 1991. At 2.1 per cent inflation remains subdued. In fact our inflation performance was the best among the G-7. Exports have grown by 14 per cent since June 1991. Corporate pre-tax profits are rebounding from their deepest slump in 60 years and are up 30 per cent from their 1991 levels. Business bankruptcies are down, not up, 3 per cent from the levels a year ago. Cross-border shopping is down. All these changes augur well for a much stronger economy in the new term.
What this country needs, what this Parliament needs for the next she months is a celebration of this good news, these positive new forces. The economy is improving. It is the exact opposite of what the motion suggests.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I want to start by saying to the minister that we in the Liberal Party of Canada supported his efforts in amending the Small Businesses Loans Act so that the
960,000	people who really drive this economy could get that support. We are happy to see him stand in the House today to commit that after Thursday the bank managers, the 7,500-odd loan officers, credit unions and small businesses of this country from coast to coast to coast will know the act is in place.
It has been a tradition in the House and in government for the last 15 years that after second reading things are promoted in newspapers and on television and radio. To use the Senate as the reason for not communicating the Small Businesses Loans Act is not a good argument. At any rate I want to go on to something else.
The minister talked about entrepreneurial spirit in this country. I think the entrepreneurial spirit is fantastic. I support him in that regard. He also talked about the fact that we are not giving out as many grants today as we did a few years ago. I think he forgot an area where we are giving out billions of dollars in grants.
Because the government has not addressed the tax preferences that have built up in the tax act, not just in the minister's regime but in previous Liberal regimes, it has not really addressed the issue of tax grants to major corporations. The minister knows as well as I do that there are close to $40 billion or $50 billion worth of tax expenditures or tax grants. Many of them have not had accountability as to whether or not they are meeting their public policy objective, namely job creation or keeping certain sectors vibrant.
I would like to hear the minister say in the House today that it might be a good time to review tax grants that have been given through the tax act mostly to foreign multinationals.


Thomas Hockin: This is always a murky area where allegations fly around. There is always a bit of truth to them and there is a lot of untruth to them.
On the hon. member's question, no government has spent more time or effort pruning the tax system of loopholes and boondoggles for business than this government. They have just about all been removed.
When we took over we had the scientific and research tax credit which was a terrible leakage. It was brought in by either the Turner government or the Trudeau government before it. Billions of dollars was going down the drain. We closed that. We have worked at closing a whole host of other loopholes. We continue to do so. As a matter of fact we have to because we need the revenues.
What we have not done is introduce a minimum corporate tax as has been suggested by a lot of people because frankly it would just hurt small business. People say they want to make sure that every corporation pays tax. It turns out that small businesses with loan loss carry-forwards from before that finally make a profit can apply their loan losses of previous years against the year's profit. We believe in that. We do not believe in taxing it back.
If they want to take big business and make an exception for it, that is an argument I would like to hear the House debate. We have to remember that small business is allowed two, three or four tax expenditures I believe in. The first one is loan loss carry-forwards. The second is that if a business is part of a grouping of companies it does not tax twice; it taxes once. If it is sending profits or


dividends to another member of the corporate family then it is taxed by that other member rather than taxing it and the other member. That is the second source of tax expenditure. I do not think any country in the world would want to double tax, to have a double corporate tax, for small and medium sized enterprises.
What would be the other big exemption? Financial institutions, the banks, insurance companies and trust companies somehow have been escaping tax because they can make loan loss provisions that are too generous or have various schemes. We have changed that. We are the first government that has actually made sure financial institutions pay their fair share of tax.
I was told the other day by a chairman of one of the biggest life insurance companies in Canada that he pays eight different types of taxes. There are three or four different types of federal taxes that he pays. That is what this government did. We now have a corporate tax structure that has been pruned of most of the loopholes that were not fair. We have left a system that will stimulate enterprise by especially exempting small business from a whole host of taxes.


Mr. Joe Comuzzi (Thunder Bay-Nipigon):: Mr. Speaker, I appreciated listening to the minister's comments a short while ago, particularly as they related to FEDNOR in northern Ontario. By and large the FEDNOR board has proven itself very knowledgeable about the particular industry from a regional perspective. Although we have some dispute in some of the areas of loans, by and large it is a very good program.
I was interested in what the minister was talking about in the small business venture. The minister has been here for eight or nine years, I have been here for only four years and a few months. If there is one thing in the thrust that this House is showing with respect to how we are going to get this economy going, it is going to come down on the back of the small business person within this country, not only in northern Ontario but throughout Canada. On that area we are ad idem with respect to how this Parliament should really operate on an ongoing basis.
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I was particularly interested in his comments on Windsor and the announcement made this past week. I know the minister is from London. Windsor is about 100 kilometres up the road. Having gone to school in Windsor at Assumption College, the university and the law school and so on one becomes veiy close to the city of Windsor and has many friends there.
I would like the minister to comment on the $900 million that was announced by Chrysler with respect to versatility on the van production. The van has proven to be a magnificent vehicle for all of Canada and the United States in production.
Chrysler will be more versatile in its production methods to compete with some of the competition presently on the road. Even though it has not created any new jobs I would be interested in the minister's comments. If we do not have them I would be prepared in the future to listen to him through his department as to how it secures and builds a confidence within Windsor and other communities.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Order please. Time is running out and I must give the floor to the hon. minister.


Joseph R. (Joe) Comuzzi: I will put my question and then I will sit down. I would like to hear about the confidence it builds and the security that it builds in those people who are employed and what effect that will have on the small business community in Windsor.


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. friend for asking that question.
It is important we recognize that the investment is very important and positive and will create confidence. I was making the point that so many big business investments just maintain jobs but they also maintain confidence and I think that is very important.
I have been told this investment will entice suppliers to make long-term commitments. These are suppliers next door, suppliers in Canada, suppliers in southern Ontario, Essex county, Kent county, Middlesex county, Elgin county and maybe stretching all the way up to Toronto. They will be enticed to make investments and to deepen their intentions to produce in Canada rather than Mexico or the United States.


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There were lots of indications of suppliers being around who are going to make reinvestments and grow as a result of this investment. Therefore they can bid for work in the United States because their whole operations will have risen up to the kind of performance level where they can export at lower prices.
I think the hon. member has suggested an important point. A large investment such as Chrysler does give confidence to small and medium sized suppliers. It makes them more competitive. This means jobs are created because they can export and so on. That is one of the good results from that announcement.
I also have to tell the hon. member that Windsor is a hard-working town. Ever since I was a kid, people of this town have worked hard. Windsor has always been an up and down kind of economy. It is a boom and bust economy that rotates around the automotive part of the economy. This will help give them confidence.
I actually salute the Chrysler people who won the Canada awards of business excellence in 1991 for quality. This great big banner is hanging outside the front door. They are very proud of it. They are just as proud of it as a small little company that wins that award. They are an example to the rest of Canada.


GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES RESTRAINT ACT, 1993 NO. 2 NOTICE OF ALLOCATION OF TIME TO CONSIDER REPORT AND THIRD READING STAGES OF BILL C-113
Thomas Hockin: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. An agreement could not be reached under the provisions of Standing Order 78(1) or (2), with respect to report stage and third reading of Bill C-113, an act to provide for government expenditure restraint.
Under the provisions of Standing Order 78(3), I give notice of my intention to move a time allocation motion at the next sitting of the House for the purpose of allotting a specified number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of proceedings at the said stages.


ALLOTTED DAY, S. O. 81-THE ECONOMY
[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Bevilacqua.
Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, first of all I want to congratulate the minister for his speech. I think he was very sincere in what he said and I encourage him to make an important announcement tomorrow. Certainly he has my support.
Having said that though, he talked about the celebration the country should embark upon. I was just wondering what exactly the details of that celebration would be when I look at the state of the economy as of March
1993.	I see the unemployment rate is still above 11 per cent. I see the welfare rolls are at 3.8 million. I see the number of people living in poverty is at 4.2 million. Not to worry, because I understand one of the government members has suggested we just move the poverty line higher to make it harder to qualify as that would make fewer people below the poverty level. Bankruptcies were at 5,401 in January. The good news is they are starting to drop. They were 18 per cent below the level of a year ago but last year, with 76,139, was still the highest in Canadian history.
Economic growth was 0.9 per cent in 1992, a bit of good news: inflation was 2.0 per cent in January. But we have suggested all along that the government wrestled inflation to the ground and wrestled the entire economy to the ground as well.
Before we get into fits of euphoria, as the minister has suggested perhaps we should do, I would ask him to take a look at the real statistics. Thke a look at the real world in Canada. I do not think the euphoria will have spread to ordinary Canadians.
Coming from Ontario, these are indeed difficult times. The Ontario New Democrats are also taking the brunt of criticism from just about everybody. I want to say that some of the statistics are never brought forward. I want to take the opportunity of putting them on the record. The federal government in some sense of misguided co-operation has continually short-changed the province of Ontario. The numbers and statistics bear out this fact.


The province of Ontario contributes 43 per cent of national taxes but gets 30 per cent in return. Ottawa pays 50 per cent of social assistance in other provinces but only 29 per cent in Ontario, even though the province has more than one million people on welfare. The federal contribution to health and post-secondary education is down to 31 per cent, compared to 52 per cent three years ago. Ontario has also been hit hardest by the economic policies of the federal government. It has lost 80 per cent of the manufacturing jobs. They have disappeared in this recession.
The motion before us suggests that we should condemn the government. However, I suspect that Canadians are tired of politicians and political parties on a continual bent to condemn one another for their actions or for their lack of activity. I suggest it certainly behoves us rather than condemning and severely criticizing one another to get together and attempt to work together to get this country out of this severe recession, if not depression, we are presently in.
I appreciate that this may be perceived as a scatter-gun approach, but I wanted to hit upon just a few government policies that have not been highlighted for quite a while.
I want to talk about the Hibernia project. We supported it but we believe it has been misguided in many of its guidelines that the federal government forged for the Canadian people. In this $5.2 billion megaproject for Canada, Canadian content has not been guaranteed. It is probably one of the few countries in the world that could forge such a megaproject and not have Canadian content assured.
About one and a half years ago Algoma Steel in my riding said: "We are shut out of the steel contract in Hibernia. A Korean firm is going to get it. There is no doubt in our minds that they dumped the product on the Canadian scene".
Algoma Steel is in difficulty. I went out to St. John's and I received a good audience and a good explanation. I was told at that time: "We are still on target. We are going to have 65 per cent to 70 per cent Canadian content". The then minister told me not to worry, Canadian content was going to be on stream.
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As it turns out, they took a review of Canadian content in the Hibernia project. However six months later various Canadian manufacturers and specifically MIL Davie shipbuilding of Quebec said that not only could they not get involved but they could not even bid on the contracts. They were being shut out completely from the market.
The Algoma Steel situation was never resolved to our liking. We could have brought charges of dumping, but that is costly and we do not have the time nor the moneys to proceed.
As we proceeded, we found the target for Canadian content was just that. It was not written in the contract. As time progressed, the amount of Canadian content decreased from that 65 per cent to 75 per cent down to 55 per cent to 60 per cent.
We found out just a couple of weeks ago that the minister admitted to being foiled over Hibernia contracts. He admitted that he could not get the major oil consortiums to allow Canadian bidding on the Hibernia project. Here is a Canadian megaproject and we could not negotiate appropriate Canadian content. There is one misguided policy.
The minister who spoke just prior talked about the next election. He said that it will not be about major frameworks. He said that it is not going to be about free trade agreements. It is not going to be about NAFTA because the frameworks are in place. The election is going to be fought community by community, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, household by household. I happen to agree with that latter comment.
However, to suggest that the frameworks will be insignificant is not acceptable. If the framework above is faulty, one must accept the fact that the structure below that framework is also faulty and will not survive.
Some of the members I have listened to this afternoon from the government side made much ado about trade agreements, the successes of free trade and the prospective success of NAFTA.
I suspect these people have not left the city of Ottawa. If they have been to Mexico, they have spent too much time in the resorts. They have not seen the reality of the Maquiladora in Mexico. They have not seen the exploitation of Mexican labourers.


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The member for South Shore talked about the productivity of Canadians. We do not dispute that, but let us not underestimate the productivity of Mexicans. Their productivity is increasing and they are becoming more and more competitive with Canadians.
To say that they are malcontents and less than ambitious is not true. They are quite productive and quite efficient and it is at our peril to attempt to compete with them on that playing field when their hourly wages in the Maquiladora could be 80 cents per hour. It is out and out worker exploitation.
For those who suggest that this will open up the Mexican market of 80 million people I ask them what they anticipate the Mexican people will buy from Canada at those wages. I would encourage members on the government side to go down there and deal with the reality of the Mexican Maquiladora area.
I would also tell them to not accept the fact that the framework of NAFTA is going forward with as much haste and as much acceptance in Washington as it is in Ottawa, by the government side. The politicians, labour groups, and environmental groups in Washington are not at all sold on the fact that this NAFTA agreement will go forward. If the vote were held today NAFTA would be deafeated.
Unfortunately this government says that really does not matter and we have to go forward with as much haste as we possibly can. It has changed its attitude toward the parallel accords. At first they were of no concern to us, they were between Mexico and the United States. Then we had to go to the table, we still did not have a strategy in place but we said we had best get to that table.
The Clinton administration has made it abundantly clear. If the parallel accords have no teeth it will not sign the accord and will not support the NAFTA agreement that is in place. The members of the administration are going group by group down to Mexico to see what they are dealing with. That is all I am asking.
I would ask the government members to get down there and see the reality. We met with some of the promoters on the American side in Washington last week. One of the pro-NAFTA people, a patriarch of the American Congress, talked derisively of labour standards. He said: "Parallel accords, whatever they mean;
labour standards, whatever that is; environmental protection, whatever that means. You just cannot negotiate these kinds of things". That is pretty scary talk and a pretty scary attitude.
He also went on to say, and I agree with him on this statement: "If the parallel accords have any substantiveness to them then they will unravel the original agreement and that is impossible. We are not going to open that agreement". The Americans are in a conundrum right now. I am happy for that. I hope the conundrum continues.
I wish that this government would open its eyes to some of the perils of this agreement. It continually trots out very powerful statistics indicating that our exports into the American market have increased. We accept that. They increased before 1988 as well. The government does not trot out statistics which show that our exports to many other countries have declined. Those are the kinds of statistics that we suggest it is not bringing forward and which it definitely should bring forward.
Another issue, perhaps in isolation but once again it is one of those issues that is presently in committee and I hope it will see the light of day in the House very soon, is that of family trusts. It is part of the taxation system in this country that the fabulously wealthy have been able to protect their fortunes for a long period of time. It would appear, after 21 years of protection of the wealthiest people in this country, that new legislation will allow these people to set aside their hundreds of millions of dollars in these family trusts for another 20, 30 or 40 years.
These trusts have gone untaxed for 21 years. We do not know how many of them there are. There were
22,000	family trusts in 1972, the value of which we do not know. We do know that one of them was worth $70 million, and that amount went untaxed year after year.
The suggestion is that 21 years is not enough time for these people to get their income tax house in order, so give them more time. I asked average taxpayers how much time they have to get their tax house in order? They get 12 months to get it in order or else. The government says that it has to extend the rule to protect the family trusts a little bit longer, another 20, 30 or 40 years, because some of these people are going to have to see a lawyer and lawyers are costly. Shame.


The second reason is: What if they have to sell something? What if they have to sell one of their small companies? Would that not be a shame. The third reason, and the most cynical of all, is: What if they have a disabled child? They must have a future. We must protect them for the future because if they are disabled then they may not be able to provide for themselves.
I say that is cynical because if they are setting $70 million aside, as one example, surely they could do a little bit of planning with their finances to ensure that the child does okay when he or she becomes an adult. I think the government threw that disabled child example out there to make us feel bad. It is difficult to even mention this here in the House, but nevertheless that is how cynical one gets when presented with this kind of information. It is not acceptable, not in any way.
We have no idea, because of the lack of information available on these family trusts, how many are out there and how much money is involved in them, but we do know that the scandalous tax system continues. If the government has its way it will continue for another 20,30 or 40 years. That is how cynical one can become.
Yet the government will talk about a UI cheat. He might be bilking the system for a couple of thousand dollars, but here is somebody with literally millions and multimillions of dollars and the government is saying: "That is okay, 21 years was not enough. We will give you a little more time to get your house in order".
It has been a bit of a shotgun approach but I wanted to touch on a few policies that irked me about the government. I do not think it is appropriate that we always condemn one another, but certainly I think the policies are misguided.


Patrick (Pat) Anthony Sobeski: Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a very specific question about the NAFTA and one of the reasons that the NAFTA is so important.
Canadian exports of auto parts to Mexico total about $100 million each year. Currently to get into Mexico they must incur a 10 per cent tariff, so a $100 part plus a 10
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per cent tariff is sold in Mexico for $110. Parts producers in the United States also face the same 10 per cent tariff.
If the Government of Canada followed the member's policy and tore up the North American free trade agreement but the United States and Mexico, who originally wanted the agreement, did work out an agreement then after the phase-out period the Canadian auto part producer would be selling his part in Mexico for $110 but the American auto part producer could sell his part down there for $100. Who does the member think the Mexicans are going to buy from? Where does he think investment will go? It will go to the United States. What will happen to the auto parts industry in Canada because the NDP does not want Canadian auto part producers to be on the same level playing field as American part producers? I want to tell the member that when the committee was holding hearings labour unions and everyone else had difficulty in answering that question.
Can the member tell me how by tearing up the NAFTA, by excluding Canada, that will protect those people in his riding, my riding, and Windsor who depend on exports of the auto parts industry.


Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, the member has lost the big picture. The problem is that he has isolated something that is a little more complex than he lets on.
What he has not pointed out is that presently General Motors has more employees in Mexico than it does in Canada. This whole concept is the global trading block that will extend beyond Mexico to Argentina and El Salvador. I have seen ads that say: "Come on down to El Salvador and have Rosie sew your garments for you. She makes 33 cents an hour, and not only that but she has a nice personality too. We also have good roads down here". The ads extol the virtues of El Salvador.
He is missing the picture. The only thing these multinationals have an interest in is relocating. They will relocate in the United States in the right-to-work states or further south in Mexico, and the big three have made no bones about it. They can hardly wait until they relocate. They have said that the only people stopping them from relocating are those bloody unions that cause too much controversy and bad press.


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If I cannot answer the member's question I apologize. I have no great expertise, but please do not lose sight of the much bigger picture. I think the member is putting the blinders on and allowing that to happen.


Mr. Ken Atkinson (St. Catharines):: Mr. Speaker, I listened to the last response with a great deal of interest because of the position I have in my community. We have a lot of automobile parts producers. They are most interested in the NAFTA and are in full support of what it does. As my friend from Cambridge pointed out, tariff barriers coming down on automobile parts going into Mexico will be a great benefit to my part of the countiy.
In addition, in the NAFTA North American content for automobiles is raised to 62.5 per cent. For someone from an area such as mine in which there are the big three auto producers, specifically General Motors, this is important. They have been asking for that increased content and now that is going to be done in the NAFTA.
The current FTA only provides for 50 per cent content. This is an advantage to our area and something that we look forward to. The labour unions were mentioned. This is something that they had lobbied for. They are now not saying anything about because it because they have this part of the renegotiation and they have this increased North American content that is going to help the automobile parts producers in my area. In that way, for my particular area, NAFTA will be a benefit.
I listened to my friend and his response to the question that was asked by the member for Cambridge and I say that it is something quite important to our part of the country which has been hard hit.
I would be interested in my friend's response as to whether we going to build the tariff barriers back up around our country. We know that nearly 30 per cent of our country's gross domestic product comes from selling products to other countries.
What are we going to do if we tear up the FTA and NAFTA? Are we going to build up tariff barriers around this country of 27 million people whose wealth and standard of living depends on trading with the rest of the
world. They are not going to say: "Oh, that is great. We are just going to be happy about that."
Another thing perhaps my friend could comment on is the fact that the auto pact is now part of the FTA. Ripping up the FTA could endanger the Auto Pact. Under the Auto Pact we are a net beneficiary. We consume 9 per cent of the cars in North America and we produce 17 per cent of the cars that are consumed in North America. The Auto Pact is very important to us and anything that would endanger that would cause us and this entire country a great deal of difficulty.


Steve Butland: Mr. Speaker, I do not want to get into a debate with a member who represents his constituency. Who knows better than he about his constituency? I will accept some of his, I hope, very valid arguments. I am surprised. I want to check some of the statements he has made that suddenly all of the opposition in the area has gone silent. I find it hard to believe that they have now gone into the woodwork. I am not going to venture into a specific debate as I suspect he would not debate me on steel, but I do not know that for sure.
Sectoral agreements in trade are good and we are saying yes to the auto pact. The Canadian steel producers of this country are saying that sectoral trade agreements are what this should be all about. Probably, on balance, we know that there are going to be some net gainers and some net losers. We will proffer the appropriate sectors and the numbers of losers under free trade and NAFTA.
I wanted to ask this question again. Who does the member think will be buying these parts from Canadian producers? Will they be shipped from his area to Mexico to be purchased by the Mexicans? I somehow doubt it.
We talked about barriers. Are we going to build the barriers up again and become protectionist? Free trade is fine. I think anybody who argues against true free trade is misguided. However, what is the problem with striking a social contract among the three countries? Is there a problem with that? They have done it with some success in the European Common Market. However, in the North American trade agreements there is no mention of it. In fact, heaven forbid if one talks about environmental or labour standards. What is that? What a nebulous, airy-fairy obscure thought.


We say: "No, not at all. Let us raise some of the standards of these Mexicans. What is the problem?" Do we have to lower our standards? Absolutely not. I agree with the member and that is probably the only thing we agree on.


Mr. Marcel R. TVemblay (Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend's motion is the kind of blanket statement that opposition members find so easy to make.
With all due respect, I would suggest that hon. members of the opposition take the time to learn about the very real efforts this government is making with regard to the Canadian economy.
The hon. member's motion gives the completely false impression that this government has been sitting idly by. Canadians know that is not the case. We have been making a genuine, concerted effort to deal with the economy and to give business an incentive to invest in this great nation.
This government has many programs that are beginning to show good results. It does not happen overnight. There is no instant solution but we are making progress.
Because of the Free Trade Agreement, along with other trade initiatives, Canada's exports are up 11 per cent. That does not represent stifled economic growth to me. This government understands economic reality, and we have clearly demonstrated fiscal and economic leadership.
During the last two decades inflation has been the most intractable problem for many nations. However, in Canada our government has conquered this killer of jobs and economic growth. Under our government inflation is now around an acceptable two per cent. The approach we have taken is a no-nonsense approach. It is an approach that avoided quick fixes, and instituted real change so this magnificent country can enjoy long-term gain.
Tkx reform has enabled Canadian business to compete around the world without being saddled by a manufacturers' sales tax. The result is that other nations see Canada with a disciplined government that puts good fiscal management ahead of soft policies designed to win
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popularity contests. We have the respect of those other nations and the confidence of foreign investors.
Over the past few years this government has been building a solid framework that will enable business and labour to successfully compete in the new, technology-driven, global economy. For example, let us just consider some recent initiatives the government has undertaken to help small businesses. I trust that my hon. friend realizes that small business is the real driving force behind our economy.
In the economic statement delivered by the Minister of Finance in December the small business loan limit was increased to $250,000. Additional forms of working capital are also becoming available. Rules for investing in retirement savings plans were made more flexible so Canadians will have more incentive to invest in Canadian companies.
We did not increase income tax or UI premiums. We did not increase the small business tax rate and there is no payroll tax for training. We made changes in the unemployment insurance program, changes that were requested by both business and labour. Besides freezing UI premiums, we are providing employers with a UI premium holiday for new companies and new employees in existing companies.
Opposition motions condemning this government imply that we should pretend there is no massive debt and just spend, spend, spend, that we should live beyond our means and place a totally irresponsible financial burden on our children and grandchildren. This government will never take that path. The people of Canada have entrusted us with a solemn responsibility to do what is best for our economic health, and we have every intention of living up to that responsibility.
This government has addressed issues that previous governments shied away from and placed them at the top of our agenda. Not because we enjoyed doing so but because we knew it was the right thing to do. This government has had the courage to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers. We have entered into partnerships with interested parties in some sectors to ensure that we are on the right path for a full and healthy economic recovery.


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We know that partnership with all stakeholders in the economy is the way to go. Last year the steering Group on Prosperity stated in its reports that, and I quote: "Our future prosperity depends on our ability and willingness to draw upon the creative talents of all Canadians. This means becoming an inclusive society, where everyone has a fair opportunity to participate fully and to contribute to the best of his or her ability".
This is much more than a visionary statement. It is a well thought out recognition that if Canadians pull together and believe in one another, we will continue to top United Nations' polls as the greatest country in the world.
The hon. member's motion reflects his concern about Canadian jobs. Perhaps he does not remember the dead-end, make-work projects of the 1970s which did not create jobs but instead increased our debt and ultimately cost us jobs. This government has not continued down that path when it comes to getting workers back to work. We want workers to be able to enjoy a comfortable life and contribute to the growing prosperity of Canada. To that end we have taken a long-term, constructive approach that will produce lasting results.
The Canadian Jobs Strategy created in 1985 emphasized the growing importance of developing workers' skills so they can actually use them in the work place. In the current fiscal year, the Canadian Jobs Strategy budget is a hefty $1.6 billion.
When the hon. member was writing his motion, did he remember the labour force development strategy that we introduced in 1989? It is a comprehensive strategy that forever abolished useless, dead-end, make-work projects and instead emphasized the importance of investing in the best resource this country has; its people.
That investment must train and upgrade workers' skills and, perhaps most important, it must develop a training culture so that Canadians realize school is not out just because they have left the classroom. Lifelong learning and acquiring higher level skills will be necessary throughout one's entire working life.
Did my hon. friend remember that this government fulfilled its promise to consult with Canadian stakeholders? To ensure that our labour force development strategy is kept on the right track, we brought together representatives of business and labour, educators, trainers, women, aboriginals, persons with disabilities and visible minorities. They are the creative and knowledgeable individuals who make up the Canadian Labour Force Development Board, a body formed in 1991 that has helped us enormously to understand the needs of the private sector and to create programs that will fulfil those needs.
Does the hon. member know that one of the first recommendations made by the Canadian Labour Force Development Board was to substantially increase the use of unemployment insurance for active programming. This idea came from people who work in the community and who fully understand that we must make the unemployed productive members of society again. The unemployed want jobs, not hand-outs.
Did we take that advice? We most certainly did. In 1992 we dedicated $1.95 billion to unemployment insurance developmental uses. That is, three times more than the 1990 funding for active programs and training for UI claimants. All told this year we are spending around $21 billion to help unemployed workers.
I trust that my hon. friend knows that Canada's unemployment insurance program is one of the most generous anywhere in the world. It is a significant burden for both workers and employers, and so, this investment must be made wisely and fairly to ensure our future prosperity.
The Canadian Labour Force Development Board has proven to be a positive force in bringing together the diverse economic interests of Canadians. Discussions are now taking place involving the Department of Employment and Immigration, provincial and territorial governments and private sector representatives to increase the number of provincial, territorial and local labour force development boards.
The people who live in a community are the best qualified to know the needs of that community. These local boards will have significant influence over a sub-


stantial amount of our expenditures on training and adjustments in their communities.
This government understands fully that community involvement is the key to a healthy, local economy. We showed that understanding when we brought in the Community Futures Program to help rural and remote cummunities facing severe labour market adjustments. Community Futures committees reflect the diversity of local interests. They create initiatives from the input of their community, initiatives that the government can then put into action.
Besides local committees', business development centres are another key component of Community Futures. The staff at business development centres have the expertise to counsel and give technical assistance to small business people and entrepreneurs.
Speaking of entrepreneurs, this government also has a Self-Employment Assistance Program that provides income support to UI claimants and persons eligible for social assistance. Rather than pay people to be unproductive, we are helping those with the skills and desire to become self-employed to get their businesses off the ground.
Our government is committed to saving jobs. Is the hon. member aware of other innovative programs like work sharing, which enables employers to avoid lay-offs during temporary slowdowns?
Our local human resource planning program helps employers develop a productive work force. As well, this government recongnizes that some Canadians are willing to move to find employment. With that in mind, we have a mobility assistance program to help individuals seek employment somewhere other than where they are currently living.
There is also the problem of long-term workers who suddenly find themselves unemployed due to industrial restructuring. The Department of Employment and Immigration will spend $300 million to help displaced workers once again become productive citizens.
In this current fiscal year, our $3.55 billion budget has enabled 850,000 Canadian workers to participate in the government's labour market programming administered efficiently and effectively by the Department of Employment and Immigration.
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In the coming fiscal year, we are allocating approximately $3.8 billion for labour market programming. I think even the hon. member will agree that figure represents a significant increase over the $2.1 billion spent in the 1985-86 fiscal year. Of that $3.8 billion, $2.21 billion will provide active training and adjustment measures for UI claimants.
I trust that I have made it clear to my hon. friend that this government is taking all reasonable steps to ensure economic growth and to help workers train for jobs that will give them and Canada long-term prosperity.
Our programs are working. The unemployment rate fell to 10.8 per cent in Februaiy, the lowest it has been in the last year. Since August approximately 156,000 higher paying, full-time jobs have been created.
I say to the hon. member, and to all hon. members, this government welcomes constructive suggestions to keep the economy moving upwards at a steady, healthy growth. Let us pull together to help all Canadians fulfil their potential and ensure that Canada has a prosperous future.


Mr. Jean-Marc Robitaille (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Mr. Speaker, I listened very closely to my colleague from Quebec-Est, the parliamentary secretary, who described in detail the importance of the $3.5 billion in funds for training. I will also remind the House of the training measures which the opposition opposed in Bill C-21 and wants to oppose again in Bill C-113.
My colleague touched on a variety of subjects. One of those which has the greatest impact on our economy is the debt load. We remember very well that when the Leader of the Opposition was in power his government increased spending by 15 per cent a year on average. Our government has brought this rate of increase down to an average of 4 per cent. The Liberals let the deficit rise as a percentage of the gross domestic product from 0 to 8 per cent. We have managed to cut it almost in half, to 5.2 per cent.
I have a question for my colleague. We have seen the waffling of the Liberal Party, which for four and a half years has voted against every spending reduction measure here in this House, just as it opposed the GST. The Leader of the Liberal Party is now trying to take a position on the goods and services tax, saying that he will


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remove it and replace it with another tax that will apply to food as well. That is really shameful! Then he changes his mind and says that he will not remove it but will hold consultations. He is really asking for a blank cheque. Finally, we will recall this great statement from the Leader of the Opposition, "You know, we must not be obsessed with the deficit; the Conservatives are becoming obsessed with deficit reduction".
So the question I have for my colleague from Quebec-Est is this: How do his constituents see the importance of reducing the deficit and how do they react to those who claim that the deficit is not important and that we must not be obsessed with it? I know the people of Quebec-Est very well since I was bom in Quebec City and a large part of my family lives in Quebec City and in your riding, Mr. Speaker. I am convinced that these people are intelligent and very concerned about the future and economic prosperity. How do the people of Quebec-Est react to careless statements about the importance of controlling public spending and lowering the deficit?


Marcel R. Tremblay: Mr. Speaker, like me, you have noticed that it is easy to recognize a Quebecer, especially one from Quebec City. His constant smile clearly shows that my hon. colleague from Terrebonne is originally from our lovely region.
Remember the evening of September 4, 1984 when it was announced that the Conservative Party would form the next government with a majority. An eminent member of the opposition said: "Anyway, the coffers are empty". Despite that, I think that we have done things which are worth listening to and repeating again and again and we have been trying to do that for several years. My hon. colleague touched on the important point of labour force training.
When a company or a country is in difficulty, just saying "eliminate the deficit" will not make it go away overnight. It is a long battle and I can say we have been through it on the issue of training. Let me talk briefly about the Challenge Program.
This program was initiated by our government in 1985. Today it gives high school, college and university students an opportunity to have a summer job in keeping with their aspirations. It gives them practical experience to show a future employer when they graduate. When we
visit some companies, we realize that these students are often hired outside the summer period, to replace someone on maternity leave or someone who has suddenly fallen ill or to work certain hours over the Christmas or Easter holidays. Tbday young graduates already have some practical experience.
This is what we are setting up for people who were not students when we took power. My hon. colleague from Terrebonne knows very well that we spare no effort to use all available funds for programs that will give Canada the highly skilled labour force needed for global and world trade.
Many countries now look up to us as an example and envy us. They are implementing initiatives that we began in 1984, but unfortunately they are doing it ten years later. If we follow these programs, we will have benefits and concrete results ten years before other countries. At this rate, Canada will long remain in the much desired position of being the No. 1 country in the world.


Robert Daniel Nault: Mr. Speaker, I have listened with a great deal of interest to the comments of my friend from Quebec.
After nine years of Tory rule and after looking at the devastation on the economic development side, the unemployment situation, the youth unemployment, people who are going to food banks in places like Montreal and Quebec City, it just amazes me that a member can stand up and say it is the Liberals' fault.
They say they are sorry, they are doing their best but they have only been in power for nine years and are still trying to get it right. They are still trying to figure which programs are going to work as far as the federal government is concerned in Quebec. They are still trying to figure out which programs they are going to use to get people back to work in Ontario.
However, it is still the Liberals' fault. It has to be the Liberals' fault. They say people cannot trust the Liberals because it was all their fault for the last 10 years, 20 years and 30 years. I want to suggest to the last speaker and to the government that, Canadians are not buying that. What they want are concrete solutions.


I would like to ask my colleague from Quebec-Est if he could tell me what the government has done to help the 1.5 million Canadians who are unemployed to get back to work.
I may be mistaken but in my mind one of the highest unemployment rates in the country is in Quebec. I would like the hon. member to tell me, besides his continual spin that it is the Liberals' fault, what he proposes to do about the situation in Quebec.


Marcel R. Tremblay: Mr. Speaker, I just want to repeat what I said earlier, that when we took office, the coffers were empty. I was from an international accounting firm where I acted as a bankruptcy trustee for many companies. I would never have thought that we would have as big a job as we were left with in 1984, which involved turning around a whole country.
The initiatives that we have put forward, without any help from the opposition unfortunately, were difficult to implement. Today, after all these years of effort, we see some very concrete results. We have inflation and interest rates under control. We just learned, as I said in my speech, that unemployment has gone down nearly 1 per cent recently and is the lowest it has been in a year. I know full well that much remains to be done, but let us be optimistic. The hard work we have done and the unpopular measures we have taken during the past nine years are bearing fruit and this will be even more evident in the coming months.


William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, the motion before us condemns the government for its policies that have stifled economic growth, destroyed Canadian jobs and exacerbated the recession.
Each time we raise this question with the ministers of the government, as we did today when I asked the Prime Minister and the Acting Minister of Finance what they were going to do about the large numbers of unemployed in this country. I referred to Montreal where the official rate of unemployment is 14 per cent. However, if one looks at those who have dropped out of the labour force the actual figure is 27 per cent with 21 per cent of Montreal families living under the poverty line.
Supply
Each time that we ask the government to do something about this the answer we get is a comparison with the recession of 1981-82. What comfort does that give the 1.5 million Canadians who are unemployed? What comfort does that give Canadians whose children are unemployed? What comfort does that give Canadians whose husbands and wives are unemployed?
Would it have been appropriate for us in 1981-82 when we were asked about the recession at that time to simply compare it with the Great Depression of 1932-37? No. That would be completely ridiculous. As a matter of fact we tried to deal with the recession in 1981-82. We believed the government had a role. As a matter of fact the things we did finally brought us out of that recession in 1983-84.
However, we did not use the cheap put-down of simply comparing the recession of 1981-82 to the Great Depression of 1932-37 which was under Conservative government, which happened under the R.B. Bennett government. We did not do that.
It is equally ridiculous and gives no comfort to the 1.5 million Canadians, who are unemployed, that are officially unemployed, to get that kind of ridiculous answer from the government.
When we ask these kinds of questions the government says: "We have put forward solutions to the unemployment problem, but you voted against them in the House of Commons". Of course we voted against the free trade agreement. We tried to convince Canadians that it was wrong. The government was re-elected nevertheless and it rammed through the free trade agreement. Yes, we voted against it and time has shown that now this has cost Canadians jobs. It was not the solution to the problem of Canadian unemployment.
Yes, we voted against the goods and services tax. Expert after expert, even those who were in favour of the goods and services tax, said that even if it was the right thing to do in the long run, the government was introducing it at a time of recession and that would exacerbate the recession. However, the government went ahead anyway and yes, we voted against it.
We are going to vote against the $6 billion helicopter proposals. We will vote against the unemployment insurance changes which are reducing unemployment insur-


Supply
ance during a time of recession when people need those moneys.
What do we see with respect to the different organizations, the different think-tanks and economic organizations that are studying this matter? The report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warns there will be no break for the jobless in 1993. It says that even though there will be a pick-up in economic growth in this country it will not mean a pick-up in jobs.
Then we have Peter Hadekel, the financial columnist in the Montreal Gazette, who says: "Very soon the working world will be divided into two types of people. Before the end of the decade less than half the work force in the industrialized world will have full-time jobs. The rest will be part-timers, temporary workers or the unemployed".
What a sad picture for the future. How can young people start a family? How can they plan to have children and build a home when all they can look forward to are part-time minimum wage jobs, non-unionized jobs with no benefits, no pension, and very often no unemployment insurance? I know that many companies try to keep these part-time jobs under 15 hours a week so the workers will not even get unemployment insurance when they are laid off. Is that the future we can give Canadians? We are seriously asking the government to do something about it.
This government is still following the discredited policies of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes in the United States and Britain. Thank God, there has been a change in the United States. The people down there recognize the nonsense of that approach where everything was left to the free market system. Now there is a government down there that is bringing back a mixed economy approach. It is a government that believes that government has a role with the private sector in stimulating the economy and creating jobs and we believe in that same approach.
The government does have a role. We put forward a proposal whereby the federal government would participate with the municipalities and the provinces in a massive redevelopment of municipal infrastructure,
roads, bridges and sewers, ports, airports, things that will stimulate the economy and provide a proper atmosphere for the private sector.
The government turns it down. It does not believe that it has a role to play. That is why it is at about 17 per cent, 18 per cent in the polls. This sort of shim-sham that is going on now, the leadership campaign, may redeem it for one month or for a couple of weeks, but the Canadian public will see that it is the same group of people with the same do nothing policies that are dooming this country and dooming our economy. It is not good enough.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: It being 5.45 o'clock p.m., it is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 81(15), to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the business of supply.


CONCURRENCE IN SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATES (C)
John Carnell Crosbie: That the Supplementary Estimates (C) for the fiscal year ending
March 31, 1993, laid upon the table Tuesday, March 9, 1993, be
concurred in.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
John Carnell Crosbie: that Bill C-119, an Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums for the Public Service of Canada for the financial year ending March 31, 1993, be read the first time and printed.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1) the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time.


John Carnell Crosbie: that Bill C-119, an Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums for the Public Service of Canada for the financial year ending March 31, 1993, be read the second time and referred to Committee of the Whole.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and the House went into committee thereon, Mr. DeBlois in the chair.
The Assistant Deputy Chairman:: Shall clause 2 cany?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 2 agreed to.

On Clause 3-


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Chairman, my question is for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans who is acting on behalf of the President of the Treasury Board. I am wondering whether the minister can assure the House this bill is in its usual form with no deviations in the normal contents of a supply bill.


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Chairman, the form of this bill is the same as that passed in previous years.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 3 cany?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 3 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 4 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 4 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 5 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 5 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 6 carry?
Supply


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 6 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 7 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 7 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall the schedule carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Schedule agreed to.
Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall clause 1 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 1 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall the preamble carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Preamble agreed to.
Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall the title carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Title agreed to.
Bill reported.
John Carnell Crosbie: that the bill be concurred in.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
[Stage Direction]

Supply
Mr. Crosbie (for the President of the TVeasury Board) The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: All those in favour moved that the bill be read the third time and passed, will please say yea.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Yea.


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On divisiion. Bill read the third time and passed.


INTERIM SUPPLY
John Carnell Crosbie: That this House concur in Interim Supply as follows:
That this House do concur in Interim Supply as follows:
That a sum not exceeding $13,880,999,941.94 being composed of:
(1)	three-twelfths ($9,564,918,577.25) of the total of the amounts of the items set forth in the Main Estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1994, which were laid upon the Table Thursday, February 25, 1993, and except for those items below:
(2)	eleven-twelfths of the total of the amounts ofTransport Votes 15 and 45 (Schedule A) of the said Estimates, $5,185,583.33;
(3)	nine-twelfths of the total of the amount of Treasury Board Vote 5 (Schedule B) of the said Estimates, $337,500,000.00;
(4)	seven-twelfths of the total of the amount of Labour Vote 15 (Schedule C) of the said Estimates, $1,072,750.00;
(5)	six-twelfths of the total of the amounts of Employment and Immigration Vote 5, and External Affairs Vote 15, and Indian Affairs and Northern Development Votes 10 and 45, and Industry, Science and Technology Vote 30, and Solicitor General Vote 5 (Schedule D) of the said Estimates, $650,959,100.00;
(6)	five-twelfths of the total of the amounts of Fisheries and Oceans Vote 10, and Indian Affairs and Northern Development Votes 5,15 and L25, and Public Works Vote 20, and Solicitor General Vote 40, and Transport Vote 1 (Schedule E) of the said Estimates, $1,669,800,500.01;
(7)	four-twelfths of the total of the amounts of Communications Votes 30, 35, 50, 75 and 115, and Employment and Immigration Votes 10 and 25, and Environment Vote 1, and Indian Affairs and Northern Development Votes 30 and 35, and Industry, Science and Technology Vote 25, and Justice Votes 1 and 5, and Labour Vote 5, and National Health and Welfare Vote 15, and Parliament Vote 1, and Solicitor General Vote 10, and Supply and Services Votes 1 and 5 (Schedule F) of the said Estimates, $1,651,563,431.35;
be granted to Her Majesty on account of the fiscal year ending March 31, 1994.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: All those opposed will please say nay.


Some hon. members:: Nay.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: In my opinion the nays have it.
And more than five members having risen:


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Call in the members.
The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:
(jDivision No. 435)
++YEAS
Members
Anderson	Andre
Atkinson	Attewell
Belsher	Bernier
Bertrand	Bird
Blackburn (Jonqui&re)	Blais
Blenkam	Bosley
Bouchard (Roberval)	Bourgault
Brightwell	Campbell (Vancouver Centre)
Chadwick	Champagne (Champlain)
Chartrand	Clark (Brandon-Souris)
Cole	Collins
Cooper	Corbeil
Corbett	Cote
Couture Danis	Crosbie (St. John's West) Darling
de Cotret	Dick
Dobbie	Do mm
Dorin	Epp
Fee	Ferland
Fretz	Friesen
Gibeau Greene	Gray (Bonaventure-Iles-de-la-Madeleine) Guilbault
Gustafson	Halliday
Harvey (Chicoutimi)	Hawkes
Hockin	Horner
Horning	Hudon
Hughes	Jacques
Jelinek	Johnson
Joncas	Jourdenais
Kempling	Landry
Langlois	Lanrivee
Layton	Lewis
Lopez	MacDonald (Rosedale)
MacDou gall (Timis learning-French River)	MacKay
Malone	Marin
Martin (Lincoln)	Masse


Mr. Redway:: Mr. Speaker, I regret I was delayed and unable to be in the Chamber when the vote took place, but if I had been here I would have voted with my party.


John Carnell Crosbie: that Bill C-120, an act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the Public Service of Canada for the financial year ending the March 31,1994, be read the first time and printed.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1) the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.


John Carnell Crosbie: that the bill be read the second time and referred to Committee of the Whole.
Allmand Baker Benjamin Blackburn (Brant)
Breaugh
Catterall
Dingwall
Duhamel
Fisher
Fontana
Gaffney
Gauthier
Harb
Hunter
Keyes
Kindy
Langan (Mission-Coquitlam) Lee
Mac William Manley
Martin (Lasalle-Emard)
McGuire
Milliken
Murphy
Pagtakhan
Prud'homme
Skelly (Comox-Albemi)
Stupich
Vanclief
Waddell
Members


Mr. Speaker:: Is it the pleasure to adopt the motion?
Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre)
Bellemare
Bevilacqua
Boudria
Caccia
Comuzzi
Dionne
Finestone
Flis
Foster
Gagliano
Grey (Beaver River)
Harvard
Jordan
Kilgour (Edmonton Southeast) Kristiansen
LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-Canso)
MacLellan
Maheu
Marleau
McCurdy
Mifflin
Mills
Nault
Proud
Simmons
Stewart
Taylor
Volpe
Young (Beaches-Woodbine)-60


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and the House went into committee thereon, Mr. DeBlois in the chair.
Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall Clause 2 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 2 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall Clause 3 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


PAIRED MEMBERS
[Stage Direction]
Belair	Blondin-Andrew
Clark (Yellowhead)	Della Noce
Duplessis	Edwards
Kaplan	McKnight
Ouellet	Turner (Vancouver Quadra)
Weiner	Young (Acadie-Bathurst)
[English]
Mr. Speaker:: I declare the motion carried.
Clause 3 agreed to.


Steve Eugene Paproski: Shall Clause 4 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.
Clause 4 agreed to.
The Assistant Deputy chairman: Shall Clause 5 carry?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


Private Members' Business Clause 5 agreed to.
Schedules A to F inclusive agreed to.
Clause 1 agreed to.



PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS


[Stage Direction]
Preamble agreed to.
Title agreed to.
David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Chairman, my question is for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans who is acting on behalf of the President of the Treasury Board. I asked him a similar question earlier today. I am wondering whether he can inform the House whether this bill is in its usual form, with no deviations from the normal contents of a supply bill. I am wondering if the hon. Minister of Fisheries and Oceans can give us that undertaking.


John Carnell Crosbie: Mr. Speaker, on our side of the House we are totally against deviations.
Bill reported.
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Waddell (p. 16093).


Mr. Speaker:: Following the adoption of the 24th report of the Standing Committee on House Management on Wednesday, April 29,1992, the division will be taken row by row starting with the mover and then proceeding with those in favour of the motion sitting on the same side of the House as the mover.
Then those in favour of the motion sitting on the other side of the House will be called.
Those opposed to the motion will be called in the same order.
The House divided on the motion, which was negatived on the following division:


John Carnell Crosbie: that the bill be concurred in.
(Division No. 436)


Mr. Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
Allmand
Benjamin
Blackburn (Jonquiere)
Bourgault
Caccia
Fisher
Hunter
Langan (Mission-Coquitlam)
Mac William
Murphy
Skelly (Comox-Alberni)
Taylor
Young (Beaches-Woodbine)-25
Members
Axworthy (Saskatoon-Clark's Crossing) Blackburn (Brant)
Bosley
Breaugh
Edmonston
Greene
Kristiansen
Lopez
McCurdy
Scott (Hamilton-Wentworth)
Stupich
Waddell
John Carnell Crosbie: that the bill be read the third time and passed.


Mr. Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed.
Anderson
Atkinson
Belsher
Bertrand
Bird
Blenkarn
Boudria
Chadwick
Chartrand
Collins
Cooper
Corbett
Couture
Danis
de Cotret
Dingwall
++NAYS
Members
Andre
Bellemare
Bernier
Bevilacqua
Blais
Bouchard (Roberval)
Campbell (Vancouver Centre)
Champagne (Champlain)
Cole
Comuzzi
Corbeil
Cote
Crosbie (St. John's West)
Darling
Dick
Dobbie
[Stage Direction]

Domm
Epp
Ferland
Fontana
Fretz
Gaffney
Gauthier
Gray (Bonaventure-Iles-
Guilbault
Halliday
Harvey (Chicoutimi)
Hockin
Hudon
Jacques
Johnson
Jordan
Kempling
Kindy
Langlois
Layton
Lee
MacDonald (Rosedale)
MacKay
Maheu
Manley
Martin (Lasalle-fimard)
Masse
McDermid
McLean
Mifflin
Mills
Moore
Nicholson
O'Kurley
Paproski
Pronovost
Prud'homme
Private Members' Business
Dorin
Fee
Flis
Foster
Friesen
Gagliano
Gibeau
de-la-Madeleine) Grey (Beaver River)
Gustafson
Harb
Hawkes
Homing
Hughes
Jelinek
Joncas
Jourdenais
Keyes
Landry
Larrivee
LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-Canso) Lewis
MacDougall (Timiskaming-French River)
MacLellan
Malone
Marleau
Martin (Lincoln)
McCreath
McGuire
Merrithew
Milliken
Monteith
Nault
Oberle
Pagtakhan
Plourde
Proud
Redway
Reid
Robitaille
Saint-Julien
Shields
Sobeski
Sparrow
Stewart
Tetreault
Thompson
Tremblay (Quebec-Est)
Tamer (Halton-Peel)
Vanclief
Vankoughnet
Vien
Volpe
Wilson (Swift Current-Maple Creek Wilson (Etobicoke Centre)
Worthy-140
Reimer
Roy-Arcelin
Scott (Victoria-Haliburton) Siddon Soetens Stevenson Tardif Thacker Thorkelson Tremblay (Lotbiniere) Valcourt Van De Walle Vezina Vincent Wilbee -Assiniboia)
Winegard

[Stage Direction]
Belair
Clark (Yellowhead)
Duplessis
Kaplan
Ouellet
Weiner
Blondin-Andrew Della Noce Edwards McKnight
Timer (Vancouver Quadra) Young (Acadie-Bathurst)
Mr. Speaker:: I declare the motion lost.
It being 6.36 p.m. this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at ten o'clock a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 6.36 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Tuesday, March 23,1993