Exactly. It is a question of whose side the government is on. In this financial climate that we are in, we are not kidding around. Many long-standing Canadian industries are almost at the end of their ropes. They were asking for financial aid but that aid never came. Now, for the companies that have signed on, the first money that is flowing is actually taxpayer money. It is money coming from the EDC to the companies that have signed on.
We were asking for that money to flow ages ago in order to allow our companies the lines of credit they needed to give them some breathing space until we could get through the final court challenge on October 13.
Those are some of the key areas that need to be looked at when we talk about this softwood agreement. They have profound implications for the forestry-dependent communities of our regions. It is hard to tell people in Smooth Rock Falls, Opasatika or Red Rock to reinvent themselves without a mill and become entrepreneurs. We have been through this in northern Ontario. We had the great adjustment committees that took a way of life and put people into a sunset life.
I have seen what it has done to communities after people are told there is no future for them and that the committee will not work with them on economic development opportunities. The best the committee said it would do was to give them some re-education. I remember the committee doing that when our mining sector was going down. What did that re-education give anyone? It taught the men in the mining sector, those who ran skidders, machines and the jacklight drills, how to play solitaire on computers assuming that somehow would allow them to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs in the dot-com age.
However, that never happened because in northern Ontario, as much as we try to develop into other sectors, we remain fundamentally based on the resources of the north, on the hydro, on the forestry and on the mineral production. Those are the fundamentals on which we build an economy. What we are seeing with this deal is absolutely no incentive to go to value added because we are agreeing to impose an export tariff on the value of the product that is created. Therefore, if we are creating value added in northern Ontario, we are paying more for it.
Why would a company do that work in the north when it can do it south of the border and get the benefits from a government that has agreed to act in a predatory fashion against its own members?
I have met with people in communities across the north, with industry officials and with union people. As New Democrats, we remain absolutely opposed to this deal, not just because it is a bad deal for Canada but because of what it says about the government's willingness to sell out our domestic industrial sector from coast to coast to coast.