Niagara, Ontario
Thank you. Good afternoon.
I want to thank Larry (Vaughn) for his devotion to the communities of the Niagara region, from Grimsby to Fort Erie, as Chair of the Niagara Region Chamber of Commerce. Thank you also, for that generous introduction.
I also want to recognize Carolyn Bones and the rest of the Chamber leadership, and thank them all for having me here today.
For the last three days, I’ve been travelling across southern Ontario and the Golden Horseshoe.
I started off at a livestock farm in Chatham, met some really outstanding local people—people who are making us proud—proud that the food we grow in this country is the best in the world.
It occurred to me—there’s that little voice that you hear as a politician, the one that says “uh oh, danger”—it occurred to me in Chatham that I was starting off my tour at a slaughterhouse.
That’s an industry we have to support. We’ve got to keep our industry safe, productive and competitive. And we’ve got to stand up for them against the protectionism that’s coming from Washington, in the form of country-of-origin labelling rules.
From Chatham we drove up along the 401. Stopped in Brantford and met with the mayor there. Yesterday we were in the technology triangle, Kitchener and Waterloo and Cambridge.
Last night I was at the University of Western Ontario—spoke with students and alumni there.
It’s really remarkable. Here we are in Canada’s industrial heartland—it’s been that way for more than a century—and everywhere you look are universities and colleges.
The University of Waterloo and Conestoga College and Wilfrid Laurier—Western—and here in Niagara, Brock and Niagara College.
Around all the extraordinarily important manufacturing plants and the farms and the vineyards, you’ve got these incredibly strong communities that are also building the knowledge-based economy.
And it’s not Ottawa that’s doing it, and it’s not the folks in Toronto—it’s you.
It’s entrepreneurs like Denis Dyack, who switched his major at Brock from physical education to computer science—and in 1992 started the computer game firm that became Silicon Knights. He’s created more than 100 jobs.
It’s business and community leaders, workers and managers and teachers—and devoted representatives like Kim Craitor and Ted Salci and Walt Lastewka—you are the engine of this region’s progress, and you’re the key to the future of our economy.
So thank you.
It’s good to be back in Niagara. It’s not the same being here without my wife Zsuzsanna.
Last time we were down we were at the Butterfly Conservatory—that’s a whole lot safer than a slaughterhouse—and I promised Zsuzsanna that we’d be back for some more Niagara reds.
And we will be. We’ll be back here just like the millions of Canadians and Americans and people from around the world who’ve spent a hundred years of weekends and holidays at the Horseshoe Falls, in the vineyards, and at the festivals.
Whether it’s trade or tourism, from the days of the Great Lakes portage through four Welland Canals and today’s border crossings—this region has always been a great hinge of the North American economy.
It’s the place where Canada stayed Canadian, between 1812 and 1814, at Queenston Heights and Stoney Creek and Lundy’s Lane.
This is Canada’s doorstep. It’s the face we show to the world.
From the diversity of its industry to the diversity of its people and the beauty of its surroundings, Niagara is a real source of pride for our country—and we’re going to keep it that way.
We need to listen to Niagara. We need to make this region’s priorities the national priorities they deserve to be.
And even—indeed, especially—when our whole economy is being shaken to its very core by a once-in-a-generation economic crisis, we can’t let the nation’s doorstep get treated like a doormat.
On border issues, on water quality, on manufacturing and EI, this region hasn’t been accorded the respect it deserves.
That can’t continue. My Party and I won’t let it continue.
The Liberal Party since Laurier has been the party of national unity. The party that understands that Canada is much greater than the sum of its parts, but only when the parts—provinces, regions, cities and communities—are strong.
Today’s Liberals are part of a tradition of inclusive nation-building whose worth has been confirmed in spades by the economic crisis we’re in right now.
Liberals believe in communities. We believe in individual initiative.
And we believe that the federal government has a responsibility to help tie Canadians and their communities together, to hitch our individual undertakings to our purpose as a country.
In good times and bad times.
In Southwestern Ontario and the Golden Horseshoe.
Through every chapter of our history and in every corner of our country, Liberals have understtod, and do understand, that the government’s job is to empower all individuals, regions, cities, towns, and rural communities to take part in adding to the greatness of our nation.
That takes vision. It takes courage. And it takes a fundamental belief that government must use its power to be the compassionate nation-builder of first and last resort.
The current government doesn’t get that.
Regions like this one are being left behind because we’re in a crisis with a prime minister who doesn’t actually believe in what he’s doing.
Last fall, when every other country in the G8 was taking action, the prime minister tabled an economic update that actually sucked $6 billion out of our economy.
In January, he was forced to bring forward stimulus measures. But his budget wasn’t really about helping Canadians—it was about Stephen Harper’s political survival.
Now, he’s letting hundreds of thousands of Canadians walk the lonely road of unemployment alone, by refusing to bring forward additional stimulus measures and by failing to fix a broken EI system.
This crisis has issued the most powerful call for government leadership in defence of our economy—our communities, our regions, our jobs and our pensions—since the Great Depression.
And far from heeding that call, far from taking action to protect Canadian jobs today and set our future course, Stephen Harper has put the federal government on the sidelines.
No national vision for infrastructure spending. No strategy for creating the jobs of tomorrow.
When the prime minister talks about the economic crisis, when he talks about its effects on Canadians, there’s a palpable lack of conviction, a real lack of understanding.
Two weeks ago, at the G-20 summit in London, the prime minister told some foreign journalists that, “the employment effects [of the crisis] are growing, [and] becoming very real on people.”
When the prime minister of my country—a country that’s lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the first few months of this year—says, “the employment effects” are “becoming very real on people,” I get nervous.
I’m talking about a prime minister who hasn’t levelled with Canadians about the state of our economy and the challenges ahead.
Who hasn’t provided a vision for recovery that sets a credible direction for our next decade.
And who hasn’t given Canadian communities and industries the support they need to adapt to changing economic circumstances.
There’s an opportunity in this crisis—an opportunity to strengthen our communities and our national unity by committing to a vision of recovery that builds the nation.
The prime minister isn’t doing that.
He isn’t listening to our communities. He isn’t listening to Canadians.
I’m here to listen. And I’m here to tell you that we will do better.
We will take a national view, but we will listen to Niagara—and we will deliver.
We will deliver a clean water strategy for the Great Lakes, no just promise it.
We will deliver EI that gives Canadians the help they need, when they need it, fairly and in every part of the country.
And we will deliver a partnership with the Americans that produces results—a secure, shared border that’s uncompromisingly open to trade and tourism—and an end to protectionism restrictions on Canadian exports, once and for all.
We will build a national vision out of local priorities.
We will build a more inclusive Canada.
And we will start here, in the energetic regions and communities that are the stuff of our country’s past and future greatness.
There are times when we feel ourselves caught up in the sinews of history. When our circumstances demand vision, and vision demands hard choices.
This is one of those times, and we must be equal to the choices we face.
We must choose to build our nation, to secure its future, and to use the powers at our disposal in the unwavering service of our national interest.
During his last campaign, in 1891, Sir John A. Macdonald evoked “those great works necessary…to make this country a homogenous whole.”
He was talking about the transcontinental railway—that ribbon of iron, the spine of our country, built against the odds.
It was monumental undertaking, and its scale hasn’t been diminished by time. The transcontinental united Canadians in a common national enterprise. It brought a young nation together in the face of impossibility.
We cannot escape our history. We don’t want to escape our history. We want to build on our history and together shape a better tomorrow.
Canada is a country of communities and regions, of nation-builders and visionaries.
And in this hour of trial, our generation must take its place.
Together, we will.
Thank you.
