Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst.
I will deal with this in reverse of the member's questions.
When he talks with great passion, as he always does, over concerns for working families, it makes me think of what has happened to my community, and a good deal of what I know he has gone through in his community, in terms of high unemployment rates. I want to make two points about that.
A study came out last week about the impact of long term and in most cases indefinite layoffs on individual worker's health. It was done in the United States. It was a wide-ranging one, a longitudinal one, which I think went on for 20 years. What it showed consistently throughout that period was when a corporation shut down a plant completely, as they followed those individual workers over the balance of their lives, on average they lost a year and a half of their life expectancy.
The only thing that differentiated them from the rest of the population, and it showed this earlier demise, was the unemployment factor when they were working. It particularly hit men and women who were in their middle forties because it was so difficult for them to find employment. They were in a situation of still supporting families. It was a very stressful incident for them and it ended up costing them a year to a year and a half in what would have been their normal lifespan.
I also thought of the two suicides I had in my community in the springtime. They were two relatively young men, both in their late thirties. They left spouses and young children. Both had lost all hope as a result of indefinite layoffs. I also think of the constant parade of individuals who come into my constituency office and who I see when I am out and about in the riding. They are suffering and are having to deal with that kind of stress.
We have solutions. We could be saving the manufacturing sector, yet we see these kinds of policies that do absolutely nothing for it.