Mr. Speaker, I know this is a sensitive area and I do not bring it to the floor of the House lightly.
There might well be a lot of ways we could add value to these diamonds in Yukon and the Northwest Territories. I am certainly open to that, but we do have controls. For example, if we want to export a raw log from British Columbia, we have to get an export permit to do that and there are very tight criteria around that. If it is a matter of shipping uncut diamonds from Canada to Antwerp, or to send some of them to Toronto where we could have them processed, cut and polished, it is a very valid public policy matter. This is something that should be examined.
Perhaps some of these value added activities could be conducted in Whitehorse or Yellowknife. I have visited Whitehorse and it is a most amazing town with attractive, beautiful scenery, and great fishing and hunting. The people are staggeringly wonderful and energetic. They are just like the member for Yukon. In fact he is probably the embodiment of the wonderful people who come from Yukon.
Do not get me wrong. I love Yukon and the Northwest Territories. If we can add value to these diamonds there, so be it, but what I am told is that there is a stronger case to be made for adding value to those diamonds in a big city centre like Niagara Falls or Toronto.
Certainly, speaking for myself, I have an open mind to this and I think there might even be a compromise. In other words, we could set up a diamond trading centre in Toronto but then ensure that there were some value added activities taking place in Yukon or the Northwest Territories.
In the absence of that, do we think that DeBeers on its own volition is going to send these diamonds to Toronto in lieu of sending them to its own processing facilities in Antwerp? We need to be less naive if we think DeBeers would do that without someone saying to DeBeers that it needs to ship some of the uncut diamonds into some value added activities in Canada, that the diamonds were discovered in Canada.