Mr. Speaker, I would like to pick up where my colleague left off. He talked about the need for a plan. Perhaps members will recall the expression “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
It would seem to me that this is a perfect example of that. The government has had no plan in place. It started back in 1966 under the assumption that it was going to phase-out coal mining in Cape Breton, and yet it has continued to hire, it has continued to open new mines and it has continued to give the impression that coal mining would be a viable way of life and a reliable occupation.
It took years and years. The plan was that it would take 15 years to shut down coal mining in Cape Breton. One would assume, albeit incorrectly in this case, that if the governing was going to shut down something as important to the region as a basic industry like coal mining it would come up with some sort of a plan to diversify the economy or to prepare people for the eventuality that there would be no coal mining. I think it was Forest Gump who said it best: “Life is like a box of chocolates”. The people of Cape Breton did not know what to expect. They did not know what they were going to get. They did not know from day to day or week to week what was going to become of the mining industry.
We are getting this mixed message. The people of Cape Breton always got the mixed message that the government was going to phase out coal mining, and yet the mines remained open and they continued to hire people. That is totally unacceptable.
Eleven months ago, in January, the government announced plans to shut down one Devco mine and to sell the other. That is not too bad. Let us see, that was 1966 to 1999. That is only 33 years. I think the government acted fairly quickly on Prime Minister Pearson's plan. It only took 33 years. When the decision was made, it was as though the government pulled the plug in the basin and let everything go at once. What a tremendously shortsighted, poorly thought out, ill-advised plan this was. As a matter a fact, this is so bad that nobody could call it a plan. At the very best we could call it crisis management.
This reminds me of other things that have gone through the House. Our House leader, the member from British Columbia, spoke a bit about this in his remarks. We seem to be getting all kinds of time to discuss this in the House today, which is appropriate, but we have had other things come before the House, which have run into the billions of dollars, on which the government has moved closure and time allocation so that members on this side of the House did not get an opportunity to express their concerns or thoughts.
I wonder if it is only a matter of an hour or so before the government House leader comes rushing in and says “That is enough of this stuff. We are going to shut you down”, because it has to deal with the tiddlywink act or some other tremendously important piece of business. It seems to me that we are dealing with the lives of at least 1,100 people in Cape Breton and there has been no alternative presented or suggested to them.
I want to talk a bit about the whole aspect of being an underground miner. I cannot imagine the bravery it must take day after day to go down into the mines, even the mines which have every safety precaution, especially those which are located under the ocean. I would think that people would have to have fairly good nerves and great resolve to be an underground miner of any type, but when the miner works underneath the ocean, a bay or whatever, it seems to me it would take a particularly strong individual to put up with that kind of work and that possibility of danger.
Over and over again we have seen that there have been cave-ins, slumps and sags. I do not consider myself to be claustrophobic, but I am sure that if I was in a shaft someplace and the roof caved in between me and the escape route, I would not be able to make that claim. Claustrophobia would set it regardless of my resolve. I admire and marvel at people who can work under those conditions.
Having said that, I want to assure the House that I am sure the people of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton are very adaptable and diversified people who could make a living in many different ways. They are talented and they have many things at their disposal which they could apply if they were given a chance.
In this instance the government has chosen only to pour money into a mine that should never have been supported. I think the original intention of phasing out the mine in 1966 was probably a good one in that there was co-operation and agreement between the federal and provincial governments. The question is, why did the government not act on it then? Instead it nursed this along to the point where people got their hopes up and then at the last minute it just simply pulled the plug, leaving the people high and dry.
I look forward to hearing what my colleagues have to say in regard to this bill. I have been listening to hon. members from Nova Scotia and Cape Breton who have talked very passionately about the problems. I am certainly hopeful that the debate today will have a great amount to do with the resolution of this whole situation in Cape Breton.