First, if the government is going to choose winners and losers in the economy, that's a wrong fundamental premise. When you're funding hundreds of millions of dollars to the wood industry to promote itself and not the steel industry or the concrete industry, there's something fundamentally wrong there. You should not rob Peter to pay Paul. In every one of your constituencies, there will be a concrete facility, and in some of your constituencies there will be a timber mill. If you are going to favour wood and have “wood first” policies, you will bring unemployment to the people in your quarry, sandpit, and ready-mix facilities in your ridings. These things happen all the time. Governments fund things that they really shouldn't fund.
Treat all building materials equally. If there isn't a market for a product, don't support it. In the seventies, we were supporting the shoe industry in Cape Breton, and all of a sudden the government said, “If we can't make shoes and sell shoes, why is the government supporting a shoe facility in Cape Breton?”
Each industry should stand on its own. We're a small country. We have only 33 million people. We're not like California, which has that many people in one state. We're not like China, which has two billion people. The wood industry needs to look to export markets to try to sell its product, not try to put people in the concrete, aggregate, and sandpit industry out of business. That's not fair.