Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for at least going through the exercise.
I began my remarks by talking about what a shame, what a tragedy and what a travesty it is to limit the debate on such an important subject. What I was getting around to was not just the face value of the argument about the closing of the Devco coal mines, but the fact that this is an issue of much larger significance.
Many things have not even been raised. The secondary impacts of shutting down Devco have not been dealt with and they will not be dealt with in any detail in the House because the debate has been limited by moving time allocation.
One of the natural things which comes to mind, one of the obvious consequences of selling off Devco and closing Devco is the whole issue of foreign ownership, economic sovereignty, loss of control of our own industries and our inability to control our own destiny when it comes to matters regarding the development of our natural resources.
One thing we have seen in this country in recent years is an absolute epidemic of foreign takeovers. In part a low Canadian dollar has led to this, and in part it is because there are people lurking just across our border who are willing to gobble up any aspect of our natural resources they possibly can. This is one of the predictable consequences we are going to see, I believe, as we divest ourselves of the Devco operations.
An even more frightening spectacle in my mind is that the whole idea of Devco was to feed coal into the Nova Scotia Power Corporation to generate electricity and to have a vertical integration. We would enjoy that benefit and the secondary benefit of the labour created by the mining of coal, that we could create electricity with that coal. There was a natural customer for the product.
Nova Scotia Power Corporation will now be in the unenviable position of trying to buy its power elsewhere. Where? It will probably be from the eastern seaboard of the United States. Mr. Peabody will supply the coal, I presume, to Nova Scotia. Who will ship the coal from the eastern seaboard of the United States to Cape Breton? It will be Canada Steamship Lines. The Minister of Finance and steamships will be going into Sydney harbour loaded with American coal to burn in Nova Scotia Power Corporation. If this seems shortsighted, if it seems economically perverse, I put it to members that it is. That is why this needs to be debated and that is why we need more time in the House to deal with some of these predictable consequences of shutting down the whole Devco operation.
I am a trade unionist and have been a union representative for much of my working career. I find in cases like this the best way to convey the true impact of this sort of economic move is to try to personalize the issue by looking at the actual people involved. If we try to visualize in our minds the actual families and workers who are being displaced by all of this, it is useful to look at a profile of the Devco employees.
If we try to get in our minds who these people of the United Mine Workers are, and there are four unions involved, of the actual members of the United Mine Workers of America union, 414 out of 500 or so have grade 12 or less education. The average age is 44.5 years. They have industry specific skills that make it very difficult to relocate into other industries. I raise all these factors to point out the difficulty of trying to reintegrate the displaced employees into other industries, et cetera, et cetera.
One of the reasons we see such an overwhelmingly low level of education in people who are fairly my contemporaries, where it is not usual for there to be over 80% of them with grade 12, is that they were seduced into quitting school and going to work at Devco. They were told the big lie. People came into their classrooms and virtually said “You can sit here and finish high school or you can go to work tomorrow with a good $12, $14 an hour job with grade 8 or grade 9 and we will keep you employed for life, until you retire, working in the Devco coal mine operation”. That was bad advice and it has complicated the reintegration of some of these displaced workers into alternative lines of work.
One of those lines of work ironically will be the next subject that we debate here today because we have been told that the government side will not put up any more speakers on the subject because it wants debate to collapse on the subject so that we can move on to the next subject which is tourism. What it really wants all the Devco miners to do is grow long, red pigtails like Anne of Green Gables so they can be cute little tourism oddities maybe. If they can learn to play the banjo or something they could entertain American bus loads of tourists who drive to Cape Breton to see them because there will be very little else for them to do, given the callous way that this whole issue has been treated.
Had we had more time and had we been given the opportunity to debate this issue further, I am sure other important subjects would be raised. But as it is now, once again we can hear the jackboots marching to the drums of closure and time allocation.