Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Lévis for his bill. I am so pleased to be able to get up and support his bill and his comments.
I heard some comments about how the Conservative Party, when it was in power, did not do things for the shipbuilding industry. Let me tell the members that the Conservative Party gave the single largest contract in the history of Canada to Quebec and, yes, indeed, to Saint John, New Brunswick, my shipyard. It injected billions and billions of dollars into the economy.
I sit in the House of Commons week after week. I got up in the last session 27 times to ask the Minister of Industry to bring in a national shipbuilding policy to make us equals and competitive. All we ever heard was “We have a national shipbuilding policy right now”. Well, we cannot compete with the national shipbuilding policy that the the Minister of Industry says we have. He should take a look around the world.
I am in favour of the International Monetary Fund helping those countries that are poor and having a difficult time. However, right now money from the International Monetary Fund is going into Korea and Japan to help subsidize shipbuilding. Here we are and we cannot subsidize our shipyards. “No, no, we cannot do that”, says the Minister of Industry.
Back on October 29, 1990, Mr. Holloway, the secretary treasurer of the Marine Workers' Federation, wrote to the now Prime Minister of Canada, when he was seated on the other side in the opposition, asking about the state of shipbuilding in Canada. The the present Prime Minister replied by saying that while the Conservative government may indeed have recognized that there was a problem, because things were winding down in the shipbuilding industry, that it had done absolutely nothing to foster the development of a Canadian merchant marine. He said that it was safe to say that most people recognized that something needed to be done to create a much more competitive shipbuilding industry, and that the government should have, as it should have done long ago and as it had promised to do, taken steps to alleviate this problem.
That was what the Prime Minister said when he was in opposition. Well, he is in government now and he says that there is no problem whatsoever to bring it in. The government has the power to bring it in, but where is it? It has not done anything. The silence from Ottawa is deafening as other jurisdictions continue to announce further support for shipbuilding in their countries. Why are we not seeing the same level of competence and responsiveness from our government?
The Minister of Industry talks about high technology. Shipbuilding is high technology, very high technology. We used to have thousands and thousands of people working in the shipbuilding industry. For every job that was created in the shipbuilding industry, there were two or three other jobs in the community that were created as well. When I am talking about shipbuilding I am talking about a national policy that goes right from Newfoundland to British Columbia. It is not just two shipyards.
Let us look at what happened recently. The United States came in and wanted to buy MIL Davie because it wanted to take over. There is no question United States has invested. We know that and we are worried about it because the United States has the Jones Act and the Jones Act protects the United States.
The United States can do all kinds of things, but we cannot go into the United States and bid on its tenders. We cannot go in and do what Americans can do in Canada. They can come here and bid on our shipyards. They can bid on our contracts. They can do everything because they have protection. We cannot because we do not have that protection in Canada.
Why are we not seeing the same level of confidence and responsiveness from our own government? We want to know why we are not. Highlights of the shipbuilding industry supported by other jurisdictions in the last two to three weeks include the week of November 10 when the United Kingdom announced new support for ship repair whereby two and a quarter of the value of the repair is given as a subsidy.
Norway has increased its subsidy from 7% to 9%. Norway has also stated its intention to provide a special new subsidy to support the building of fishing vessels. Germany has reintroduced subsidies to the level of 9%. Of the 68 shipbuilding nations on the planet today, 67 of them have national shipbuilding policies.