Mr. Speaker, two weeks ago, I asked a question of the Minister of Industry who, very casually, did not bother answering it. And yet, I was asking him a very important question regarding the conversion of defence industries to civilian production.
As you know, for the last three years, due to the international situation and defense budget cuts, the industries involved with defense production, 60 per cent of which are located in Quebec, have been going through horrendous times.
So much so that 10,000-Mr. Speaker, you heard right, I see worry on your face-jobs were lost in the military sector and it is the reason why I had asked the minister to highlight the concrete measures his government intends to take to remedy this disastrous situation.
I was flabbergasted when I realized that all he did was skate around the issue. The minister, whom I thought was an earnest man, could not tell us anything in spite of the promises made by his government during the election campaign. They are in the red book which has know become a black book for Canadians.
This government must give us its agenda and assist these industries. There are 600 in Quebec, 30 of them in jeopardy for lack of orders. And yet they have plans, and they know how to go about this long-awaited diversification.
Allow me to quote the great Quebec specialist in the area of conversion strategies, Professor Yves Bélanger who made a statement confirming my own conviction in the Le Soleil on April 16. He said the defence industry is not lacking in diversification ideas, especially given the fact that it gathered the greatest concentration of specialists attracted there by good salaries and research conditions.
And Professor Bélanger concluded that we must act quickly and adequately since recent experiences show that it takes from five to seven years to convert half a company's capacity from military to civilian production. We will necessarily lose some very important players along the way if the government does not act swiftly.
One wonders why the government does nothing; it certainly has the proper tool for it, namely the Defence Industry Productivity Program under the management of minister Manley and his department. It is the perfect instrument, the ideal vehicle for the implementation of a conversion program.
How come the minister has not found the vim to propose a schedule, and a concrete plan for addressing that problem which weighs heavily upon that important industrial sector?
Mr. Speaker, you have here a man who is demoralized by this negligence on the part of the government, but I want you to know that the fight will not end for us until the government presents a concrete program or schedule. It can be sure that we will continue to fight relentlessly as long as the government will not have produced a real program including a schedule.
The stakes are too high for Quebec for us to allow the government to fail to produce a work schedule by the end of the session. We challenge it to act on this, Mr. Speaker, and you can be sure that we will be watching it closely and urging it to exercise great caution.