Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate this evening. It gives me a chance to follow up on a question I posed to the Prime Minister on April 20. I asked him the question not only on my own behalf but on behalf of the forestry communities in my riding of Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing in northern Ontario. They are suffering terribly at this very difficult time. Thousands of workers have been laid off. Families are affected.
First of all, I asked the Prime Minister about the idea of having a national forestry summit. I think we have to get our best minds together and include our community leaders, our industry representatives and our union leaders, the stakeholders that represent a broad range of interest in the forestry sector, to see what we can do as a society and as a country to ensure the ongoing strength of our forestry sector.
Our country was built on forestry. If it were not for forests of Canada we would not have seen some of the great ships that travelled the oceans of this world hundreds of years ago.
As well, I asked the Prime Minister about the softwood lumber deal that his government negotiated with the U.S. shortly after the Conservatives took office in January 2006.
I would like to quote from a letter from the United Steelworkers of America, Local 1-2995, in Kapuskasing. Its president, Guy Bourgouin, began his letter of August 28 of last year with “despite this success”, and by that he means the successes that Canada had had up to that time at the various WTO and NAFTA resolution tribunals. There had been some tremendous progress recorded by the industry, Canada and the provinces before those important panels. He said:
However, despite this success, Canada appears to have capitulated to U.S. demands. Under the proposed deal we are still faced with restrictions on our access to the U.S. market in the form of a tax and/or quota, we are agreeing to allowing U.S. oversight of our provincial forest policies, and we are leaving a billion dollars of illegally collected tariffs south of the border. To top it all off, there is nothing in the agreement to ensure the stability of employment in the forest sector or the ongoing viability of our forest dependent communities.
I could not have said it any better myself.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, which has led the charge in calling for a forest industry summit, says that the summit is necessary, that funds are needed to ensure that communities affected by the tremendous downturn in the sector have a chance to diversify their economies, and that more research needs to be done. In fact, the union says the whole management of R and D related to forestry needs a new and serious injection of federal investment. The union calls upon the government to help promote stable employment in our forest dependent communities.
The Liberal Party position before the election of 2005-06, as announced in our November program, included measures to do exactly what the unions are calling for. They were measures to help workers and their families, to help communities diversify, and to invest in R and D. In fact, at that time we also made a commitment to help advance to the companies a significant portion of the funds that were being held by the U.S.
Unfortunately, with the help of the Bloc and NDP, the Conservatives--