Mr. Speaker, I speak on this issue with a degree of knowledge, since I was the Bloc Quebecois critic for natural resources for a while, in fact, at the time the government decided to shut down Devco's operations.
I listened carefully to the Liberal Party member, who hopes that the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Government Operations, or perhaps it will be the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development, will review this bill and propose amendments.
A major problem here is that a committee, and I say this with all due respect for committees, will sometimes come to certain conclusions. However, if cabinet and the Prime Minister do not agree, the committee will unfortunately have to forget about its good recommendations and go in the direction shown by cabinet.
Therefore, since money is involved—the amounts are important but not exorbitant; on the contrary, they are too small—I am afraid that the minister's directives will be rather strict and the committee will have little leeway.
The Liberal Party member suggests, among other things, that the miners could be represented on the board, perhaps by a union representative.
We all know that a single representative on a board may be listened to but, no matter how well informed the representative from the mining sector may be, he can never convince the board to overstep its mandate, which will be defined in the legislation, since the act specifies the amounts involved. It cannot increase the moneys that would otherwise be available to the miners who are being laid off in this sad episode.
There are already some lessons to be learned from this situation. For years the federal government has been meddling in regional development. As early as 1960, it was recommended to diversify the economy of Cape Breton, which was essentially based on coal mining.
Unfortunately, these recommendations were never implemented and the federal government kept on pouring money into coal mining. Hundreds, thousands of jobs were created this way, but strictly in coal mining.
Today, as the government is getting ready to stop supporting this industry, which sadly has not been profitable for years, we can see the economy collapsing in the area because the diversification announced and expected 40 years ago did not take place.
This is by no means the only misguided example of the federal government's interference in regional development. A case in point is Atlantic groundfish. There is no more cod. Sadly, it was over-fished while the federal government was responsible for ensuring the sustainability of the stocks.
In many cases, the federal government may not be the best actor, it may not be in the best position to know what is important for a particular region. Here in Ottawa, everything is fine, of course. We look around us. The economy is relatively prosperous; the number of research centres is increasing. Just because things are going well in this bubble all around Parliament Hill does not mean the same is true everywhere. The Gaspé is another place with a number of problems which have made the headlines in recent weeks. Today, we are talking about Cape Breton.
There are not just the laid-off workers to think about. These 1,000 workers have families. If we look at the impact of the economic collapse resulting from the Devco shutdown, we are talking about approximately 6,000 people—men, women and children—who will suffer the consequences. This is tragic in an area where Devco held up the whole economy.
Earlier, the Liberal Party member mentioned that these employees could perhaps be put to work cleaning up the ecological aftermath. This labour force could indeed be used, but this is to lose sight of what should have been done and what the unions suggested at the time.
Devco employees have vested rights. For one thing, they have been paying into a pension. Some of these employees are a few years away from retirement; others have much longer to go. If Devco itself had made an effort to do something about these clean-up operations, Devco employees would have been assigned to these duties as part of their regular duties. Their pension would have continued to grow and at some point these people could have retired.
At the time, the union had done some fairly specific calculations showing that retirements would be staggered out over the period between now, when the mine is being closed, and the time the clean-up was complete. The work force could thus be gradually reduced to a minimum. All these employees could have retired with a reasonable pension, with families looked after, with children who could have continued to grow up in their community.
By abruptly pulling the floor out from under these workers, the security they have accumulated has just disappeared. Even if they are given jobs, they will not have the assurance of a decent retirement on a reasonable retirement income, no matter how hard they work.
If the committee could manage to convince the minister that he needs to sweeten his offer so that the workers can remain with Devco, this would be a considerable improvement, and the ecological cleanup referred to by the Liberal member could be carried out.
I trust that the committee will manage to do so, but I sometimes lose hope when I see the best ideas and the best initiatives running headlong into a wall of misunderstanding, for reasons that we do not know and cannot understand. The plan may seem to make some economic sense in the short term, but in the medium and long term it will result in personal disasters on an unacceptable scale.
I see I do not have much time left. Hon. members will have understood by now that Bill C-11 is unacceptable to the Bloc Quebecois, both from the legal point of view—and we will be coming back to that—and from the human point of view. This bill is, first and foremost, unacceptable in the way it treats human beings.