Mr. Speaker, I have had the opportunity to visit the member's riding. As a former British Columbian and Yukoner, I have gone through Skeena—Bulkley Valley on many occasions, and he is absolutely correct. Not only is it one of the most beautiful areas in Canada but it has some of the hardest working people in those mills and in forestry and, I may say, in many ways in a very environmentally sustainable way because they know the future relies on their jobs in those mills.
It is sad to see a number of businesses in small towns like Fraser Lake, Burns Lake, et cetera, closing down or reducing the number of employment opportunities which has caused people to go elsewhere. He now knows exactly what we on the east coast have been going through with our fisheries. He also knows what the farmers are going through now on the prairies.
I have been here for nine and a half years now and I have seen and heard of countless numbers of farm families shutting their farms down and the large corporate companies taking over. I have seen many fishing communities, like the one in Canso, Nova Scotia, literally shut down and thousands of people having to move away from their homes.
In the last week alone 3,000 jobs have been lost in the lumber industry under the watch of Liberal and Conservative governments. It is a pattern. It does not matter which industry it is, farming, fishing or forestry, which I call the three f's that built this country, they are being decimated by the government.
What scared me the most today was when I heard the Minister of Natural Resources, who himself is from British Columbia, say very clearly, “We need this deal so we can restructure the industry”. That makes me very nervous. My colleague is right when he says that whole logs are being sent out of British Columbia into the United States to be brought back as a finished product that we buy. It is like the world's largest gypsum mine that is just outside of my riding. Every ounce of gypsum is sent to the United States and we buy it back as Gyproc.
Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy and that we need to turn this around? I would like my colleague to elaborate a bit more on that.