I have a few that I was thinking about since we got the agenda.
First of all, not to belabour the point—I was speaking with Mr. Masse earlier about this—but as of yesterday in Bombardier's announcement there was both some positive and some very negative news as well. I would like to see them before this committee. I'd like to understand what it is that they are facing right now, and what it is they're looking for from the government, whether it's just from a regulatory perspective or also a monetary perspective, because sometimes those things go hand in hand. Sometimes you can change one and it changes the other in terms of the need. That's something I'd like to see as soon as possible.
Secondly, I would like to see at some point a study of the repayable loan program, whether it's through FedDev or Western Economic Diversification. Governments in the past, including Conservative governments, have essentially purchased portions of companies. I'd like to understand the effect of that on the marketplace as well as on the government side.
Then there's something we've seen over and over again, which is in the minister's mandate letter, and hopefully we can talk to him about this when he gets here. There's a statement in there regarding the transition of manufacturing economies into some other economy. I'm not sure what that is, where those jobs are going, what that's going to look like, and how many jobs we're looking at. What are our goals, specifically in southwestern Ontario, to be very precise? The Prime Minister said that as well in the past, which was reiterated in the mandate letter.
I'd also like to understand what types of training programs would be provided to those people as we “transition” them out of manufacturing jobs, as well as what the government would be looking at in terms of interim financial support to these people for whom we're trying to find other industries to go to.
The final one is a study of BDC. I'll tell you that one of the most frustrating things I've seen in our finance sector is when you have a private institution doing business against a taxpayer-owned crown corporation. It shouldn't happen, not in this economy, not in this country. One of the most frustrating things I've seen is when you have a private-sector finance company, credit union bank, tier one bank, going up against a publicly funded, publicly owned crown corporation like BDC for business.
That is not their mandate. Their mandate is to supply capital into the marketplace where it does not currently exist so that they can spur economic development, not replace dollars that the private sector's already putting forward. I can give you 100 different scenarios over the past five years that I've been involved in, and I've heard of others before that, where it blows your mind. It's just a poor use of taxpayers' money. That's certainly something I want to see us drive right down into.
If we can encourage BDC to free up funds to invest in areas that actually need capitalization and can't get it today, instead of being in places they shouldn't be, that can have a very strong economic benefit, specifically in the manufacturing sector.