Thank you, Chair. I'm delighted to be here to take the place of my Nova Scotian colleague Scott Brison, who is away.
Minister, thank you for coming to the meeting. Thank you for your comments.
You're aware that shipbuilding is an issue for a number of us who represent areas where shipbuilding is an important part of the economic landscape, and for somebody from Nova Scotia, it's about as historic and traditional as it gets. Nova Scotia used to be a world leader in shipbuilding. We still have a number of people in the industry. It's high-quality work. But we are concerned about a number of issues, and one of them is the EFTA deal.
It's not our intention to vote against this. We support free trade in principle. Norway is clearly the country we have an issue with on shipbuilding, but Norway is a country that I look up to immensely because of the way it conducts itself in the world. So I'm not condemning Norway, but I am concerned about shipbuilding.
Being new to the committee, I haven't been part of all of the discussion, but I've followed it. One of the concerns the shipbuilding industry has, apart from the fact that they simply don't like the EFTA agreement because Norway has had a policy of supporting its shipbuilding industry that's been much more generous than the policy supporting the Canadian shipbuilding industry.... That in itself is a problem. But at the very least, we think we need to have a national shipbuilding strategy. Some people might say we have one. I don't think we have one; not many people would say we have one. We need to have a national shipbuilding policy that takes into account things such as a strengthened Buy Canada policy. The whole procurement policy is very important: continuous procurement, direct allocation—these are all things that shipbuilders and shipbuilder unions have talked about for years. I find remarkable the extent to which the workforce in the shipbuilding industry and management in the shipbuilding industry are aligned on a lot of these key issues.
My overarching question is, when are we going to get a serious, robust national shipbuilding strategy in Canada? Is that something you're prepared to lead on as this EFTA deal goes forward?