What I'm going to take away from this meeting today is an idea of what the Conservative strategy for jobs is, and that's learn to speak Spanish or Chinese, buy a plane ticket, and say “Adios”.
How can a Canadian worker compete with $3 an hour or $2 an hour, or however much they pay in El Salvador or China? It takes government support to support our industry. We look at EMD: it went to the States. It had U.S. government support. The pay that they were getting in Canada got cut in half. Now, if our government had been willing to support EMD, maybe we would have been able to keep those jobs here.
I don't see this government supporting any workers in Canada. Frankly, the more evidence I see from this government, I see that it's interested in union busting, clearly.
This is the largest single loss in the aerospace industry since the demise of the Avro Arrow. Just coincidentally, the replica of the Avro Arrow is being turfed out of a museum right now.
It doesn't seem to me that the Conservatives want an industrial strategy at all. These people who were employed with Aveos spent money in their communities. They paid their taxes, they raised their kids, they raised their families, and they built local economies. Those are the people who build local economies, not a bunch of managers who put their money offshore, who don't even live on Canadian soil.
If we look at innovation, you are the innovators here. You're the practical side of the ideas application. You're doing the work on the ground. The government's job is to prepare the playing field for you, and we've seen that they've clearly failed at doing that. If you look at even the World Economic Forum, we see Canada's ranking dropping every year in terms of their competitiveness with regard to innovation. You are the innovators. And now we see that dropping further.
Now, the government is trying to roll out a plan regarding innovation, but as far as I'm concerned, it's too little, too late. They haven't been looking at the indicators and I'm not sure if their plan is going to work, especially with the Minister of Finance busy attacking the Premier of Ontario.
You got to the key there: you said mismanagement. Well, this government's being mismanaged. You talked about the top managers screwing over the people on the bottom. Well, that's what this government is doing.
Don't you agree with that? Don't you agree that this is clearly an exercise in union busting? And if it doesn't stop today, if we don't stop this union busting, it's just going to continue within each sector of the country, and unionized workers are going to be screwed over by this government.