Yes, exactly, that is why I am here and why I was elected. They are my buds. I would say to the Conservatives, even playing that Conservative role for a minute, that I have an alternative for them.
We have a crisis in the manufacturing sector and it has taken the government, which has been the government for almost 20 months, a little better than 18 months to finally come to that realization, and maybe even a little longer. For the first time this past week and on the weekend, we heard from both the Prime Minister and the finance minister that they would finally do something.
However, they have said before that they knew there was a problem with the manufacturing sector but they said that their tax breaks would take care of it. Again, playing Conservative, I am saying that it is not working but that I still need to help my buddies in the big corporations so what am I going to do? At this point they do not know what they are going to do.
I am going to play Conservative again and play their role and I am going to tell them what they can do. However, before I do that, I want to emphasize that the policies they have put in place up to this point have not worked. They have really had two that were supposed to help the manufacturing sector. What will come as no surprise is that one of them was giving corporate tax breaks.
I will stand back now and not be a Conservative anymore. I will be critical of the Conservatives. So much of what they do is so simplistic that I will keep it simple for them because maybe they will then understand it.
The way the corporate world works is a company produces a product or service, it pays all its bills and whatever is left over is profit. The government comes in at that point and tells the company that if it made a certain amount of profit, then it must pay this percentage of it in tax. I think that is pretty simple and even the Conservatives could understand it.
What they do not seem to understand, so I will share this with them, is that the crisis in the manufacturing sector is so bad now that there are no profits. If companies do not make profits, the government does not come in and tell them that they must pay a certain share of it because there is nothing there. That is the situation we are in. Corporate tax breaks are of no use in those circumstances.
What is the second point that the Conservatives always make when we say that they are not doing anything? They say that they have sped up the write-offs for any investments the company makes in its company to produce a product. If a company invests in its corporation and in new equipment, the government will let the company write that expense off more rapidly against the company's income and revenue.
Again I will make this simple. If there is no net revenue coming in, no profit coming in, a company cannot write it off. More important, this is true right across the manufacturing sector which has been going down and has been in crisis for a long time now. This goes back, of course, to when the Liberals were in power, so I am not pointing my finger only at the Conservatives. I am pointing my finger at both of them because they both missed the boat on this one. The manufacturing sector has been going down for so long that any reserves it had have dwindled to the point where it cannot afford to invest in corporate equipment.
In addition to that, in spite of all that money the banks are making, they are not that interested in lending the money. Again, they are not profit-making corporations in a large number of cases. They are not good credit risks as far as the banks are concerned and they turn them down.
Therefore, regarding their two plans, corporate tax breaks do not work because there is no profit to tax, and more rapid write-offs on equipment cannot be used because there is no money to invest in the corporate field. We need another solution.
I will go back to playing Conservative. I am saying, okay, I have all this money coming in from the banks, the financial institutions and from the oil and gas, maybe what I should do is try to help out another one of my buddies in the corporate sector, in the auto manufacturing sector, textiles or any number of industries within the manufacturing sector that need help. That is what I am proposing they do.
That is not a radical thought. It is a very conservative approach, and I mean that in the pure sense of the word conservative. A fiscally conservative approach is that governments involve themselves in the marketplace when they are needed to be involved in the marketplace. Therefore, they are safe in their ideology.
In addition, there is no politically dramatic shift here because both the Governments of Ontario and Quebec have already done this. They have moved directly in and have told the manufacturing sector that they have made pools of funds available for companies to invest in what they need to make themselves more competitive, to expand their industry or to be able to export more. Those are all the good things that the Conservatives love to talk about.
I will go back to being an NDP member now and say that what I am most interested in is that if we do that we create jobs and put people back to work.
Let us talk about the employment situation in the manufacturing sector.
We had a very detailed debate about a year ago in this House on the textile industry and what was going on there. Between two to three years ago, Canada had roughly 100,000 people employed in the textile industry. When we were having that debate about a year ago, those numbers had dwindled to 50,000. What came out in the course of that debate was that by the end of another two to two and a half years, we would be down to 10,000 people in the textile industry. What has happened, both with the Liberal government and the Conservative government, is they have just stood back and let it happen.
What I am worried about is that the same thing will happen to the auto industry. I come from Windsor and Windsor-Essex county has the largest auto sector. In that two and a half year time period, we have lost 17,000 jobs in Windsor-Essex county and that is in a population of less than 400,000. All those jobs, without exception, were well-paying jobs, jobs that people could raise their families on, pay their mortgages and maybe even have a holiday. Across the country in the manufacturing sector, at least 250,000 jobs, if not closer to 300,000 jobs, were lost in the last two and a half to three years.
Much of what happened in the textile industry is happening elsewhere in the manufacturing sector. I see it primarily in the auto sector but it is happening in other areas.
The Province of Ontario and the Province of Quebec have said that it is time for the government to help. They have also told the federal government that it must do its share. The government loves to talk about partnerships and about working cooperatively. It is now time to pony up. It is time for the government to come forward and participate in saving the manufacturing sector in Canada.
I have said this repeatedly and I will now repeat it in this speech. I have done some research and I have not been able to identify, across the whole of the globe, and I have gone back over the last roughly 100 to 150 years, one national economy that functioned in a vibrant way without having a key manufacturing sector as a significant component of that economy. However, the present government and the previous Liberal government have repeatedly taken a hands off and will not help. They told the manufacturing section that it was on its own at the same time as they brought in trade policies and implemented those trade policies that allowed other governments, other economies to sack our manufacturing sector. Because they protected their manufacturing sector, we allowed them to come in, penetrate ours, purloin the best parts of it and we just stood back and let them do that while we were shut out from their economy.
Canada has repeated that over and over again. We saw it with the free trade agreement back in 1988-89. We saw it with the North American Free Trade Agreement. We saw it with policies and in a number of different trading arrangements. We are seeing it right now. The current minister, who is negotiating with South Korea, is willing to give away the fort once again, particularly in the auto sector.
There is a simple solution on an interim basis. We see that from the province of Quebec and the province of Ontario. The government should be joining with them, as a national government, and assisting the manufacturing sector.
The auto parts manufacturers have said that it needs, $400 million in a fund that they can borrow against. Overall within the manufacturing sector, the estimate is that we need a fund at the federal level of $1.5 billion. It is here in the corporate tax breaks. All the government has to do is forget the corporate tax breaks to the banks and the oil and gas companies and put it into this fund.