Again, my pleading here at the committee is because, at the end of the day, this is about real people, real jobs, real communities. As Randy was saying, we hear over and over about power. We've heard now we've got agreement with quotas and regulation, and nobody notices until the plant closes down.
One of my colleagues, regarding the plant that I visited over the weekend in Brockville, said that what businesses do with these agreements is sometimes they have plants in every country, but they don't close the plant in Canada. What happens is the future investment goes into these other plants. Then one day something happens and they just close and it's gone. People ask what happened.
I think Randy said something that was really important, that there's something going on here, and we have to deal with this right away because this could get really bad really quickly. I don't want to see any of my colleagues' communities go through what I've gone through. If there is hope, if there's a way that we can actually get an allocation to that plant, I think we have to do everything we can to fight for those jobs because they're worth fighting for.
My worry is that, once they've gone, this manufacturing sector is always very vulnerable in these trade agreements. We've got to make sure we get a little more aggressive and quit playing the boy scout in some of these situations, because these jobs are hugely important for our future, our kids and our country.
