Mr. Speaker, well, it will be a bitter Christmas for the 400 laid off workers at Norboard and Tembec in Cochrane. It is the same story across northern Ontario. Tembec and Timmins are down. Grant is down. Wawa is down. Dryden is down. Kenora is down.
We had a motion in the House to help the forestry sector and the manufacturing sector at a time of crisis, and what happened? The Liberals allowed that motion to be killed. They sat on their hands.
Now that people back home are finding out, the Liberals are scrambling to come up with excuses. Get this: They claim that if they stood up for the forestry families in northern Ontario, there could have been an election and they would have lost seats. What a pitiful response. They chose saving their own political skins over fighting for the hard-working families in northern Ontario.
If the Liberals are going to take a dive every time there is a vote in the House, they should go home, stop collecting their pay and leave the work of opposing the government to us.