Bill 4, Securities Amendment Act, 2011

March 16, 2011

Mr. Anderson: I would like to speak to Bill 4, Securities Amendment Act, 2011. I’d like to say that I support this act. I support the former minister of finance’s very clear and concise arguments for why we need to keep securities regulation provincial in nature and protect our jurisdiction over it.

You know, I find that the Canadian government just seems to continue to try to find excuses to get involved in areas of provincial jurisdiction that I just don’t think is their business. For example, education. Education is clearly a provincial jurisdiction, yet they have all kinds of programs, student loans programs, all of these different programs that are run federally for the provinces. Why not just transfer the tax points to the provinces and let us administer all of the student loans, for example, and all of the different funding for these types of things? So that’s an example.

Another example is health care. Why does the federal government have any right whatsoever to regulate . . . [interjection] Well, the British North America Act doesn’t give them the right to do that. They’ve assumed that power, and they’ve just kind of filled the space that I don’t think they should have the right to fill. I think that areas of health are a provincial jurisdiction. That will allow provinces to experiment with different forms of health care delivery and so forth and make sure that we can have best practices instead of being tied to the whims of a federal Parliament that has no business dealing with health care legislation. That’s not their purview. It’s not what they should be dealing with.

There are all sorts of different areas where the government of Canada has encroached upon the provincial jurisdiction of the provinces: health care, education, and many others. I would say, too, that, you know – well, I guess that’s a separate example that I talked about yesterday with regard to the Canadian Wheat Board, but I just find it amazing that we can’t sell our wheat and barley in western Canada.