I don't agree with tabling this and setting it aside. There's a real sense of urgency around this. Anybody who has gone out to speak to the families and communities that are being hit with this, particularly the one-industry communities, will know that there is no tomorrow here. They need assistance now or else they lose--they lose all their investments in their homes, their small businesses, their industries.
Yes, some of them may have to pick up and move to places like Calgary—where there is no housing.
These are very devastating and difficult circumstances. There are some communities in northern Ontario where people are actually walking in now, from the States particularly, with credit cards and buying up homes as cottages so that they can come up and spend the summers up there. This is pretty devastating stuff for these folks.
For us to suggest for a second that we put this off somehow to some other committee, or that somebody else deal with it.... I know that ultimately it would have to go through Finance, but I think we can send a message to Finance from this committee that this is really important. This is of some urgency.
In terms of the billion dollars the Conservatives rolled out—I'm wondering if they think that's enough—the hanger they put on it was that it not flow until the budget is brought down. Now I'm hearing from the finance minister that the budget is going to be.... We thought it was going to come soon, and now it's not going to come soon at all. It's going to be later, apparently.
How long are you going to make these communities twist in the wind here? How long are they going to wait before some money from the federal government flows out to them so that they can take care of their immediate needs? There's an urgency here, a real urgency around this. As I said, all you have to do is go out and meet with some of the people in these communities to get a real sense of that urgency.
So I would suggest that we not table this, that we not put it off, and that if in fact at the end of the day it is Finance that will deal with it ultimately, we send the message to Finance that this is really important and needs to be done, that we need to get the money out the door so that these communities and these families can take care of their issues in front of this terrible reality in the manufacturing and forestry sector that they had absolutely no hand in causing. They just got up every morning, packed their lunch pail, went to work, worked hard, and then one day the plant closed down. Now they're being asked to shoulder the whole burden, for the most part, in terms of the impact.
I think it's incumbent on us to do the right thing, and to do it immediately.