Mr. Speaker, I have a small question that remains unanswered. I put it to one of the hon. member's colleagues previously. Quite a few years led up to this flawed deal. There were also the previous negotiations by the hon. member's government, only to arrive at an equally flawed deal, one that was maybe even worse according to the government today.
They can decide what cabinet confidences were broken in the delivery of that news, but in all those years leading up to that, there was one thing about small and medium-sized producers in particular. Oftentimes the small and medium-sized mills are family based, with an extremely high ratio of investment dollars per job. This is an important ratio for people to understand, because as the consolidation of this industry has been going on over the last 10 years, it essentially has meant fewer and fewer players in the market, fewer and fewer manufacturers of wood, while provinces, and in particular the Gordon Campbell government in B.C., have increased dramatically the raw log exports going to southern mills and mills in other countries.
Anyone looking at the profile of the softwood industry knows that the greatest good is gathered at the processing level, not at the extraction level. While there are a few jobs out in the bush for taking wood out to the manufacturing level, there are relatively few in comparison to that. With increased technology, there are fewer still.
Through all of this consolidation, this larger format for companies, we have petitioned the hon. member's former government and the current government on loan guarantees, the ability of some of these medium and mid-size manufacturers to acquire the loan guarantees to allow them to compete with some of the bigger players in the market. Those requests fell on deaf ears in the previous Liberal government as well as in the current Conservative government. We simply cannot get anywhere with this. It is something that industry has called for consistently and New Democrats have joined them in that call.
Can the hon. member square this circle somehow and explain to me now how the Liberal Party is actually suddenly interested in those companies and those communities that have suffered for so long?