Mr. Speaker, we are talking today about an extremely important motion for ridings like mine, for the whole region and the whole of Quebec. Indeed, the textile industry is more present in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.
I have been listening to the debates since the beginning. More specifically, I have heard the previous Liberal speaker say that, to put measures into place, ten years of negotiations were, at times, necessary. My reaction is that, in the textile industry, we have been seeing the problem coming for more than ten years. I have been in the riding for quite a while, and I can tell the House that we have been seeing the closing of factories in the textile field coming for a number of years. It has even been called the « soft sector ».
Therefore, I am asking my colleague who has just spoken why, according to him, that industry has been neglected to a point where, today, we are about to lose it almost completely, even though it provides jobs for almost one hundred thousand workers.
Why that lack of foresight? Why do we have to wait until disaster hits before we do anything? Is the federal government dragging its feet? I think so. We are in a position to see the problems coming. We have people ready to respond. We set up parliamentary committees. We invite people so that they tell us what is going on, and yet we shelve the studies until disaster strikes.
Does the Conservative member recognize, just like me, that the government is completely out of touch and fails to seize the opportunities to improve things before a catastrophe occurs?