Mr. Speaker, my colleague seems to have difficulty understanding that when we allow the economy to become as unbalanced as it is right now, and we start hollowing out a whole manufacturing sector that has been built since the second world war, we are not doing ourselves any favours.
It is not true that the jobs that are being created at Starbucks and at Wal-Mart are going to properly support families and allow us to replace the good paying jobs in the manufacturing sector.
I believe that he knows that and I also believe that he knows that his government is on the wrong track, and yet by ideological blindness he continues to convince himself, although he is not able to convince other Canadians, that his Tory government is right to allow the manufacturing and forestry sectors to simply die on the vine.
Look at the agricultural sector. We are going through the same problem right now. It has simply become too expensive to export. We have seen this type of economic problem before. It existed in Holland when hydrocarbons were found there in the 1950s. It emptied out its manufacturing sector and it took them a long time to rebuild a balanced economy.
We have the second largest country in the world but only a population of 33 million. We must have some form of assistance to maintain a balanced economy. That is what the Tories simply do not understand.