Fair enough. I welcome the intervention to set the record straight.
Going back to the training elements of this, I look at what we have in front of us now as an opportunity to try to improve what's going to take place in the subsequent investments.
I won't take up too much more time, but I do want to impress upon you how important it is to me and to Mr. Jowhari. I have been on the picket lines. I don't know if many people here have ever been. There are so many times that I've been on the picket lines, whether it was for the Windsor assembly plant or for the tier twos and threes, the feeder-tier plants, where they have fewer rights and less support, like at Local 195, with Emile Nabbout and others. They do auto supply support. For those workers at a tier one plant, where my brother works, they often are left a little farther behind than the assembly plant. Everything matters. Every dollar matters. Fighting for the benefits, the safety of the plants....
I just came from a discussion in the halls of Parliament here. We were discussing the environmental conditions. My community has some of the highest cancer rates in the country. We have significant environmental degradation related to the work that built the manufacturing centre for this country and for the automotive sector. That's a legacy cost that we have. That's in our water. It's in our land. I was on council when we did the first brownfield project. A contaminated former Chrysler truck assembly plant is now a shopping mall, but it took massive public incentives to do that, to recover it.
This touches us in every way. As the auto sector has diminished—and this is important for these jobs in Windsor—so has our support for the United Way, because people don't have the same amount of fiscal capacity they had before. Millions of dollars annually have been lost from the not-for-profit sector and other charitable organizations as we've witnessed plant modernization, more use of machinery, less use of human capital and labour, and fewer jobs—and those were hard-fought collective agreements won by the unions.
By the way, it's important to note that, for the government's response in terms of the feds and the provinces, this comes on the backs of the negotiated agreements of Unifor to get investment into this country, the same as with the other ones that have been done in the past. This, to me, is very important with regard to not only the personal aspect but also a professional one. I also want to mention the community aspect. Every opportunity where we can increase the employment capacity of Canadians to work on these elements, in these places, through these deals—the more we can shift that—is worth it. If it's one job.... That was made fun of when I first raised it and that's okay. I can live with that. If it's hundreds or thousands of jobs later on and training, even better, but my job is to come here to fight for jobs. As things currently stand, I have a lot of concerns.
I'll conclude by saying that I'm glad my colleague raised this. Again, I'm happy to give him some more briefing on the Ambassador Bridge and how they now want to bring toxic materials and hazardous waste, which is actually going to affect the auto industry as well.... We're fighting that. I'm giving a briefing to the minister today on that. I can do that outside the halls here so that we don't have to drag everybody else into the conversation.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.