Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all my colleagues for speaking on this motion. We rarely agree in committee, but I think we can agree that Bombardier was very much tone-deaf when it came to making this decision on executive compensation.
In my short 17 months as a member of Parliament, I've learned a lot. I've engaged with a lot of different stakeholders. Coming as a corporate lawyer, I was always against corporate bailouts. When it happened in 2008, I couldn't really get myself to believe in why the government was stepping in and bailing out those automakers, but if you take a step back and you look at the real-life impact on Canadian families of these policy decisions....
My family has always been in the taxi business. When Uber came in, I realized on a daily basis the impact of that, similar to that of a steel plant closing in Hamilton, as a lot of members of my community drive taxis. They saw their wages drop overnight by 50% or 60%. There was a real-life impact of trying to pay your mortgage payment, trying to pay your heating costs, trying to put food on the table and send your kids to university. Then I think about the 4,000 jobs that we're saving with this investment at Bombardier and the 1,300 more that we're creating, and the reasonable conditions under which this loan was given to this company.
Was it unfortunate? Are we disappointed with the company's lack of appreciation and the tone-deafness of this decision? Absolutely, I think we can all agree on that. I think the overall commitment of this government...and not just the Liberal government this time. Previous Conservative and Liberal governments supported the aerospace sector because it's an important sector in this country and it supports a lot of good Canadian jobs. I think that's something we should all be proud of.
Those are just my thoughts on this motion.
It's something that we can become uber-partisan about. We can play a lot of political games. Both parties are experts at that. There's no shortage of that in this room. Let's take a moment to put ourselves in the shoes of the families that we're going to be able to support through this investment that we're creating, those 4,000 jobs that we're maintaining and those 1,300 that we're going to be able to create.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.