Madam Speaker, I am quite happy to be speaking to this Bloc motion today. This whole area of retraining of older workers is an area with which my part of the country has had quite a bit of experience. On some occasions people have been placed on the unemployment ranks as a direct result of federal actions and sometimes as a direct result of federal inaction, and sometimes for other reasons.
I can give some good examples of that. Certainly, in the fishing section my riding was hit harder than any other riding on the west coast. This occurred when we had the so-called Mifflin plan, which downsized the fishing sector. It was a federal buyout of commercial fishing licences. It reduced the number of licensed boats and licensed fishermen in many communities by huge numbers, sometimes up to 90%.
This displacement of workers was addressed with a federal program which was administered by a group set up locally to administer and run programs. This ran for several years. I think the Mifflin plan was introduced in the mid-nineties. This plan ran for three or four years. It tried to give people skills that they did not currently have to make them available for alternate work. It had a very high placement rate.
The reason why it did was because it was run locally and run in a way that was very practical, hands on and bottom line oriented. It was not run by a distant bureaucracy. It was not hamstrung in its ability to be creative in how it operated. It did a lot of things in conjunction with the local community and/or local businesses.
That is an example or a model of how things can operate in this kind of environment. We brought those people who were running that program in the north island to Ottawa. They appeared before the fisheries committee at that time. We had some very good feedback. On balance that was a very good program. The program was terminated a little prematurely. During its lifetime it created some very good results for people.
I have another example of retraining or measures for older workers which was quite different. We had a large copper mine on the north island that closed in the early nineties after about 35 years of operation. The community of Port Hardy was very dependent upon that mine for employment and tax revenue.
The miners from that operation, who were in the older age category, became eligible for the tail end of a program that was run by HRDC in those days, whereby they could bridge to retirement. It was not a retraining program and not at all in tune with this. This was another example of what kind of measures can be looked at in terms of older workers.
Certainly, to get into an extended training program, the intent of individuals is to stay where they are which is not where employment possibilities may be. Since they are not that far away from the ability to retire, just bridging for retirement makes a lot of sense at times. In the case of this mine, some miners took advantage of that. That meant that they ended up staying in the community, retaining the assets of their home, continued to contribute to the economy with their retirement fixed income, and many of them are still there today. It would have been a great loss to the community if they had moved away.
My riding contains the wood basket for the coast. The largest part of the annual cut for the forest industry in coastal British Columbia would come from the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. That has meant, as a consequence of the softwood dispute, that there has been a huge displacement and restructuring in that workforce.
It occurs to me that other than a community-based softwood adjustment package announced by the government, there has been very little done for the industry or the workers and their families in this area. One Friday afternoon announcement in Ottawa of a guarantee for a client customer of Bombardier exceeds in total the aid that has been coming forward from the federal government to the entire Canadian softwood industry, the workers, families and communities, despite the fact that the softwood dispute is our number one trade dispute.
It is the world's number one trade dispute. It has gone on for years. It now consists of trade harassment and at this point it appears that the government federal strategy is to starve our own industry into submission, so that it will be willing to surrender to some kind of a deal which is not in our national interest.
This lack of commitment to older workers, particularly in the softwood area, is a concern. We have a private member's Bill C-364 sponsored by the member for Fort McMurray—Athabasca. It talks about support for industry in disputes such as the softwood dispute in an important way. One of the clauses talk about compensation:
--on more than one occasion within any period of six years or continuously during any period of more than two years, been the subject of an unjustified restrictive trade action or actions in respect of the export of Canadian goods to a foreign state by the government of that state, the Minister shall pay all reasonable legal expenses incurred by the exporter or the association in any litigation actions enforcing the terms of a trade agreement.
Right now the Canadian forest industry is being asked to pick up the tab on most of the legal costs for what amounts to pursuing legal and trade actions that are in the national interest.
I see that I am not going to be able to complete my presentation because my time is up.
