Mr. Speaker, the hon. member who asked this question could read everything the Liberal Party said when it was in the opposition.
All the alternatives are there. In my remarks, I blamed the government for its inaction. I did not criticize it for not doing the impossible. There are indeed ways to ease the conversion of our defence industries. The Bloc Quebecois suggested the establishment of an assistance fund. Incidentally, the Liberal Party agreed that such a fund should be set up to help the conversion of defence industries. Labour unions, the CNTU and the FTQ, and the Quebec Liberal government are waiting for some action on the part of the federal government, but I am sorry to say that nothing is forthcoming.
In my riding, there is a plant that manufactures shells and gunpowder. Purchases by the Canadian army represented 70 per cent of its order book, but the Canadian army is buying less and less. That firm decided to convert its operations to cleaning up contaminated soil. It has professional engineers, architects, and chemists. A whole group of qualified employees work on that project, but they need government support. They do not necessarily need money, maybe just technical help, but they do need it. Yet, the government turns a deaf ear to their requests. True enough, we have a $500 billion debt, and we should not let it increase unduly. But we are letting unemployment rise. In the manufacturing industry, we lost 11,000 jobs in the last four years.
The government spends $1 billion without flinching to create 45,000 jobs, supposedly, through its infrastructure program. We are not asking the government to spend $1 billion on restructuring defence industries, but only to offer some kind of help to the people in those plants. Waiting for the plants to close and creating more unemployment is not going to help the economy either.
We already have much too much unemployment, so this government should make it its duty to help the workers whose job is at risk before they lose it. As I was saying earlier, what good is it for the government, with its infrastructure program, to create jobs, on the one hand, if it does not help the defence
industry workers and loses twice as many jobs, on the other? That is not progress, it is a setback.