Mr. Speaker, all the mindless moralizing, tongue clucking and finger wagging that we are hearing from this side of the House is the same attitude that came with the announcement that 1,100 coal miners in Cape Breton were out of work.
The so-called analysis of the event wafting out of all the ivory towers west of our island could barely contain a content for coal miners, the whole tribe of poor cousins east of the Gaspé. Our sin, to hear the chattering elite tell it, was twofold: first, we were poor; second, and even worse, we were undeserving poor, the kind that is able enough but unwilling to do much for themselves, always expecting others to take care of them.
Where do such ideas come from? I have never met a coal miner who believed the world owed him a living—not my Dad, not my Uncle Ronnie at the bottom of Number 26 colliery, not any of my relatives who went down in the mine, not any of the miners on the street where I grew up, not any of the miners I know anywhere in Cape Breton. But what do I know? I am not a newspaper editorial writer or a television news anchor. I do not get paid to pontificate. I am a coal miner's daughter who grew up in Glace Bay.
I do not have the sensibilities of people who dig abstractions for a living. I know about the men who dig coal for a living in Cape Breton and what I know is that the last thing any of them ever got was a free ride. What I know is that they had worked like hell for every single thing they got and still do.
I know they did the best job in the world, year in and year out, until their bodies were broken by the work. The men took it and came back for more. They battled the bosses when they had to, but always did the work. Whatever it took to dig the coal, they did it. Through the long days of summer they did it. Through the short days of winter when they got up in the pitch black of the dying night to descend into the pitch black of the mines, finish their shift and come up as pitch black as the coal itself to the home in the pitch black of the new night, they did it.
They did it for their wives and the kids and for the almighty company overlords of the British Empire Steel and Coal Company and the Dominion Steel and Coal Company and the Cape Breton Development Corporation and for Canada. They did it to get a paycheque and earn their way. They went into deep, dark holes in the ground where the earth creaks and the pit props groan. They endured dust and heat and wet and cold and noise and vermin in a hell that no devil ever dreamed of. They gasped for air and staggered to the surface after bumps that squashed their friends to pulp or blew them to smithereens, turned around, worked in a rescue, cleaned it all up and then went back underground again. They did it to pay their way and because we counted on them to do it.
When the wars came, we implored them do to it. Coal was life and death. Coal was the margin of victory. Our world ran on coal. Every comfort, every convenience, every essential service was tied to coal and Cape Breton miners provided whole mountain ranges of it. They served us all well. They never, ever got something for nothing.
Clifford Frame, who built the Westray Mine that vaporised 26 miners in the early morning of May 9, 1992, got to walk away to live in the sunshine without a scratch. Miners were not that lucky.
They say Devco is unprofitable, whatever they mean considering the source and however significant such an assessment can be considering our island's political history. To date we have been left with only the word of the federal government. But if it truly is unprofitable, it is not because of the miners. God knows enough of them died trying to make it otherwise.
Taking away our living is an injury all Cape Bretoners will have to bear. Blaming us for the loss is an insult that sears our souls. It is cruel and callous to expect us to submit to the snide chiding of self-appointed pundits who see us as latter day cargo cult civilization, always watching the skies for gifts from the gods of government. Give us the respect we deserve. Do not add the indignity of insult to injury.
We earned everything we ever got. We earned it with our sweat, our blood and our tears—oceans of sweat, lakes of blood and rivers of tears. There was a time when it was enough to earn us a living. It should forever be enough to earn us respect.