Mr. Chairman, the last comments of the hon. member for Acadie—Bathurst might have been provided by my speech writer about the need to remember rural Canadians in the overall context of the nation, and not simply to deal with the urban centres.
One of his opening comments was interesting because I spent some time in Elliot Lake when it was a mining community. One of the comments made was that the first day of the end of a mine is the first day of operation, when the first shovelful is taken out, because the material mined is a non-renewable resource.
However I do not know why the member would characterize himself as a doomsayer by wanting to talk about how we would deal with the issue 10 years down the road because that is exactly the appropriate way we would have to look at it. A multifaceted and dynamic approach needs to be taken. There is not just simply one aspect to it.
First of all, we in rural Canada, when we are natural resource based communities, need to maximize the resource we have. Let us take the mining industry as an example. The member talked about that in a number of areas and it is important to emphasize in terms of remembering that there is a very fine line between what is ore and what is rock and it is basically the cost of the ingredient and the cost to produce it. Therefore, one of the things we need to work on in the natural resource industries in rural Canada is using technology. We need to use research and development and to support that in order to bring down the costs of production so we can lengthen the amount of time a particular mine can be in operation.
The member also mentioned the need to value add to the commodities we are harvesting or are mining. That again is another strategy to maximize the benefit of a resource.
I think the third component of that is indeed to look ahead to the time when that particular mine may not be there. We need to look ahead by continuing to do further exploration so that other mines may come on stream or, as in the example of Elliot Lake, to find an alternative way to sustain your community.
These are the types of things I talked about in my intervention when I mentioned that there is a need for a public policy perspective that is unique to rural Canada, that is specific to natural resource based economies and that deals with those very specific issues that I think the member put forward very well.