Mr. Speaker, I will ask the hon. member to hopefully answer a question that I would have liked to have directed to the hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George, but I was unable to do that.
The hon. member for Cariboo—Prince George said something remarkable in his speech. He said that the forestry industry was not really in a crisis, that things were not terribly bad.
There was something in the Vancouver Sun today, something that we know happened about four months ago. The town of Mackenzie, which is north of Prince George, totally runs on forestry. Every forestry worker, 1,500 of them, is out of work. This town has shut down. The other 4,500 people in the town depend on those 1,500 people for their shops to run as do every other industry.
People are leaving their homes with mortgages on them. These are 55-year-old workers. The whole town has become a ghost town. In Prince George itself, the United Steelworkers Union has said that out of 5,000 sawmill workers, 2,200 have lost their jobs. That is 50% of the workers who are totally dependent on that industry.
What does the hon. member think is a crisis if that is not?