In Cochrane and Iroquois Falls, it nearly had to shut down. Service Canada had to introduce a project, but there wasn't any administrative staff to run it. We're talking about providing training and services to communities that are still hard-hit by the lumber crisis, which has also hit Smooth Rock Falls. So we're in a strange situation.
In Timmins, the work remains to be done. The town has approximately 45,000 inhabitants, 19,000 of whom are Francophones. There's no Francophone community health centre to do prevention or provide services in French. A committee has to be organized to redo all the feasibility studies in order to obtain those services. We're lacking Francophone doctors. In fact, we're simply lacking doctors.
The needs are obvious, and now that the major battles have been fought for education and health services, we view ourselves as agents of economic development. We're not asking for charity; we simply want what is owed us according to the ideal that's been set at the language level and at Canadian Heritage. We sort of represent the fibre of Canada. We want to be able to do our job to adequately develop our communities in northern Ontario in order to prevent our young people from migrating. There are economic diversification projects in tourism and other fields, but we can't make adequate progress.
Now is the time to do it. Global economic circumstances call for economic diversification, which means more manpower training. For example, in Timmins, there is a French-language college that's completely inadequate. We need 65,000 people to work in the mining and forestry sectors, but we aren't able to train them because we don't have either the institutions or the qualified personnel to do it.
We're fighting because we want to contribute to the economic vitality of our communities, and not simply that of the Francophone communities.