Mr. Speaker, some days this place reminds me of Yuk Yuk's, the stand-up comedy headquarters. We listen to speaker after speaker and sometimes we just have to shake our heads.
When the Liberal Party of Canada votes at its national convention that we have a serious problem with our shipbuilding policy; when we have workers from coast to coast to coast, who know the industry, saying that we have a serious problem with our shipbuilding industry; when the owners and the administrators of the various shipyards are saying that we have a problem and when every expert in the country on shipbuilding is saying we have a problem, we probably have a problem.
People have been standing in the House saying that we do not have a problem because a policy is in place. I would like to issue a challenge to all my friends sitting across the way on the Liberal benches. I would like them to jot down on a piece of paper what they think Canada's shipbuilding policy is. Can anyone imagine the kind of hodgepodge we would come up with?
We would have a few people saying that our R and D credit is one of the best in the world. That is fair enough. Some people would say that some EDC programs are concerned about funding some of our exports. Yes, that is good. Some members would mention the people who are doing very well in a particular yard or agency. However, what is our strategy? What is our policy? What is it that we are trying to accomplish as a country?
Let is look at the records of the other countries that are involved. Let us look at the United States of America which has a policy and articulates clearly what that policy is. All members of the congress, if asked, would indicate what they understand their national shipbuilding policy to be. They would not be 100% correct, but they would at least be in the ballpark.
I again challenge my friends opposite to articulate today what our shipbuilding policy is? The answer would be an embarrassing no. That is nothing new.
We are the second largest country in the world but do we have a transportation policy? No. We are the second largest country in the world with water from coast to coast to coast. We have one of the major reservoirs of freshwater in the world but do we have a water policy? No. We are one of the major trading nations in the world and, historically, always have been. One would think that if there was a single country that had a shipbuilding strategy it would be Canada. Do we have a shipbuilding strategy? No. The answer is no, no, no. We do not have strategies. We do not have policies. We do not have programs and plans because we believe in the liberalization of the marketplace. That is our plan. It is called free trade. We are the free traders of the world. We do not like government encumbrances. We do not like tariffs. We do not like things that are limiting. We do not like the Jones Act in Canada. We are a free trader. We are the global marketplace. We are the free marketplace and that is our mantra. If we do not believe in the free market then we cannot believe in plans. We cannot have strategies. The market is the strategy.
No one else believes that stuff. If there has ever been a collection of boy scouts, we have to be it. Probably, if we looked back at the backgrounds of all of the men and women of the House of Commons, we must have been girl guides and boy scouts at one time because that is how we act. We are really nice people who like to help people around the world. We will just abandon all of our tariffs and everything, but nobody else will. We will just abandon any strategy we have or any support program from the government, but nobody else will.
I give my Liberal friend who just spoke a great deal of credit. He talked about Taiwan. If there is supposed to be a free trading nation it is Taiwan, but it is not a free trading nation. It has huge subsidies in its shipbuilding sector. It has huge infrastructure subsidies. It probably has subsidies in every single sector there is.
The banks and the governments are all involved. One of the reasons Taiwan has done so well compared to other countries is that it actually has a strategy. The banks know what the strategy is, the investors know what the strategy is, the unions know what the strategy is and the managers know what the strategy is. Everybody knows what the strategy is, but not so in Canada.
Canadians were quite hopeful a few years ago, particularly those who were knowledgeable of the shipbuilding sector, because they received a letter from the Prime Minister. It said, “It is safe to say that most people recognize that something has to be done to create a much more competitive shipbuilding industry”. The government should now, as it should have long ago, and indeed as it promised to do, take steps to alleviate the problem.
The people working in a shipyard and receiving a letter like that from the Prime Minister would probably think that once the Prime Minister got into office and got a nice majority government behind him, they would actually see some significant changes such as employment in the shipbuilding sector going up and some long term strategies coming into place. This would be a natural assumption for a voter to assume.
Here we are now, some eight years later, is there a strategy? No.
I always listen to what my Liberal colleague has to say because he actually has some very useful observations. He said there is no level playing field when it comes to the shipbuilding industry. So here we are, the level playing field enthusiasts, playing the game with no other level playing field enthusiast to play with, but we went out there and levelled it all off to the point where we now do not have much of a shipbuilding industry.
This is a very frustrating debate. I want to congratulate my hon. friend from the Progressive Conservative Party for at least bringing the issue forward. I know we have all been listening to the various groups that have come from the various shipbuilding sectors explaining what they felt ought to be done, that we ought to have a clear strategy in place. They do not necessarily want subsidies, but they do want a plan.
What would that plan look like? Most of the shipbuilding initiatives we take, we take either because we are embarrassed into something or it becomes so acute we have to sort of say that we will need to have a fleet of ferries, or we will need to build a whole number of frigates, or we will need to do this or that. It is sort of a last gasp decision.
It would be nice to have a plan in place where we could say to the various shipyards on the coast that we will start building this number of ships over the next 10 years, these kinds of ships over the next 15 years and these kinds of ships over the next 5 years. Every shipyard could then plan and know that some of the government programs would be coming.