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Our government is focused on creating jobs, growth and long-term prosperity and on creating the right conditions for Canadian businesses.

The federal government's role is to establish a process whereby industry can pitch a project, and Canadians can be reassured that this project is worth the risk. That's at the heart of governments granting permits and communities granting permission. People understand we do need economic growth. We do need natural resource projects.

If Canada could simply apply the basic principles of sustainable development, such as the internalization of costs and 'polluters pay,' it would have long-term beneficial effects, both environmental and economic.

What Canada has to do is to have a government connected to the priorities of the people of which it is elected to serve. Those priorities include ensuring medicare is sustainable, support for the military, and tax and justice systems that work.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

On the way from Chicago, I spent the summer of 1947 in Ottawa, helping to build the first of a series of econometric models for the Canadian government.

As a people, we know what we can do, we know how to do it, and we just want to get on with it. How? By ensuring that Canada's place in the world is one of influence and pride.

Canada is like an old cow. The West feeds it. Ontario and Quebec milk it. And you can well imagine what it's doing in the Maritimes.

For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation.

For many years, the government of Canada has massively supported orchestras and the arts in general.