Mr. Speaker, again, another passionate and knowledgeable member from Nova Scotia speaking about an industry that seems to be, by design of both the previous Liberal government and now this Conservative government, a sunset industry.
I remember in Sault Ste. Marie, in the early nineties, when Algoma Steel found itself in some difficulty and needed to be restructured. The comments from many commentators, Liberal members of Parliament and Conservative members of Parliament, and the member for Toronto Centre will remember this very clearly because he was involved in some of the most intimate discussions and negotiations that went on around that time to save that industry, were that it was a “buggy whip industry”, something that we should cast aside and forget about and perhaps ask the people of Sault Ste. Marie to just get retrained and enter into some other industry or economic activity that nobody had yet defined for us at that particular point in time, and we fought that.
I was a member of the government of that day and we came up with a plan for Algoma Steel that was homegrown, that had contribution from all kinds of stakeholders. The workers, the union, the community itself, the NDP government of the day all came to the table and came up with some very creative and innovative ways to save that industry. In fact, it was some of the good work done then and the seeds sown then that gives us reason to be proud today to say that even in this difficult economic time we are still making steel and selling it in Sault Ste. Marie. Nevertheless, it is owned by a company out of India that so far has acted as a good corporate citizen and that is serving us well, but certainly not as part of the kind of free trade scenario that is being proposed in the bill that we are debating here today. It would give away literally all of the very good and profitable industries that served Canada for so long in the shipbuilding sector.
I would like to ask the member, being from Nova Scotia and seeing the impact of free trade agreements over the last number of years on so many of the resource-based industrial sectors of our economy, how has that affected her community, particularly, and her province? It we pass this bill, what would that do to the people of her riding?