Mr. Speaker, the consolidation of industries, and the consolidation in particular of this industry, has been staggering. We have watched mill upon mill get bought up. It almost seems like in the last five years, in this particular plight of industry as more and more tariffs were slapped onto Canadian companies, more and more of those sawmills were either shut down or bought outright. When they are bought, it is not as if business continues as usual. Anybody who has been at the bottom end of a consolidation knows what that means. It means job losses. It means losses to entire communities.
If anyone in the Conservative benches would actually like to stand and debate some of these issues about what is going on in northwestern British Columbia, I would urge them to do so, but the interest seems to have been lost. The air is out of the balloon.
The Conservatives just want this thing to coast through and not actually address the concerns of mill owners I just talked to this past week. They said, “What's the point?” They have been struggling to get their mills up and running and were finally able to do it after some months. Then they looked on the horizon and they saw more dark clouds mounting. The clouds were a self-imposed tariff on their industry. Why? Because George Bush needed a deal and the Prime Minister wanted it so bad he could not wait.
He could not wait after this many years to look at the decision by the Court of International Trade. The court said, “It's all yours Canada. You were right. These communities were right to survive and thrive on the industry that they had built”.
Instead, the Prime Minister and the Minister of International Trade needed something so desperately that selling out a few hundred communities, selling out families, was not so bad because in their equation maybe that was worth it in the long run.
As parliamentarians, as people who are elected, we have to go back and look those people in the eye. We cannot have what happened to the Atlantic fishery. All those parliamentarians over the years turned a blind eye to what we knew was happening while the federal government shirked its responsibilities. The cries that came out from those communities that needed a sustainable industry fell on deaf ears. Now, we are watching a repetition of this in the softwood industry. It is an absolute disgrace.
We try our best to look through the legislation, to read this deal, which I have done, and which I hope and pray that the Conservatives at least have done in their blind support for this thing. I cannot find one scintilla of enthusiasm for investing and reinvigorating our softwood industry.
Instead, we have a $12 million cut to a beetle fund that would help mitigate what was going on with the pine beetle outbreak in British Columbia. That was the answer: sell them out down the river one day and pull back funding to help communities transition the next. That is hardly supportive of rural Canada. We are going to have to switch governments as soon as possible.