Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Yukon for raising the issue of the promise of the Arctic vessels, the three icebreakers that were promised during the last campaign. I can assure him that I also was excited about this because I was hoping those ships would be built here in Canada and possibly in Halifax.
As a result of my deliberations with people within the navy in Ottawa and Halifax, we will never see three armed icebreakers in the far north. It is not going to happen. Another broken promise by the government. The other promise of course was a 500 man battalion in Goose Bay, Labrador. It is not going to happen.
Regardless of that, my question is on shipbuilding, a question that I had asked on a previous day. The government is currently in negotiations with South Korea and Norway, through the EFTA countries, on free trade agreements.
The NDP cares about our shipbuilding industry. I know there are members of the Conservative Party who care about it as well because it affects their ridings, especially the member from Lévis, Quebec. The reality is that we fear that they will be putting shipbuilding and marine industry on the altar to sacrifice, so to speak, for other trade agreements.
These are the same Conservatives who under Brian Mulroney allowed the Americans the protectionist system of the Jones Act. My hon. colleague, the parliamentary secretary, knows very well what that is. The Americans excluded shipbuilding and the marine industry from the free trade agreement. We were asleep at the wheel and let it happen. Now it appears that the Conservatives once again will be asleep at the wheel and sacrifice our shipbuilding and marine industry for something else.
I want to ask the department some very simple questions. Having a domestic procurement is important and I thank the previous and current governments for some of the promises they have made that these ships will be built in Canada. However, we also need a commercial industry as well in order to be viable. If the yards in our country are no longer viable, then the problem will be that we cannot build, for security measures, our war ships, Coast Guard vessels, laker fleets and ferries because the yards will not be there to build them.
What is the essence here, the fact that down the road we could have another country building our fighting ships? Is this the goal of the government? I hope not. I believe that in its heart of hearts it does not want to see this happen.
Today we had a shipbuilding conference. We brought in members of labour and the Shipbuilding Association. J. D. Irving was present, for example, and many other people. We came up with some simple recommendations and they are the same recommendations that were presented in 2001. The previous government, unfortunately, sat on that document and never moved.
The Conservative government has now been in power for 13 months and there is no indication of where it will take this very vital industry. From Victoria to Marystown, the workers in those communities have a right to those jobs.
Does the government believe in a viable shipbuilding and marine industry and will it ensure that under no circumstances will this industry be sacrificed in the free trade talks with EFTA and Korea?