Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the comments on the sell-out that we have been watching.
I heard the Conservative member from British Columbia talk about how great this was for communities. If she had visited the communities in my region in the northwest, she would clearly have seen that the last 10 years have been one devastation after another. There have been huge consolidations and massive layoffs of the workforce. What certainty she has talked about is certainty that can be torn up in a moment by one party alone. In particular, the Americans can simply claim that some unfair and unjust practice has taken place in Canada and walk away from the deal.
Bullying tactics may have worked. I know the hon. member works hard on community support. However, I have a question about all those years when massive consolidations were going on across the industry. Small operators, in particular, were crying out for loan guarantees so they could improve their operations while we were being hammered by tariff after tariff. Those cries for those types of guarantees, which the Liberals had the capacity, the knowledge and the wherewithal to do when they were in power, fell upon deaf ears.
It is extremely difficult to suggest that the Liberals have any significant and strong support for those communities when all those loan guarantee requests, and lo and behold they even came from the Conservatives, were simply not answered.