Madam Speaker, I welcome my colleague back. I know certain issues around water and others will be front and centre in his mind again. We did good work on the environment committee together.
My question is around choices that the government is making in these uncertain times. We will see a series of the government's choices this afternoon. I would suggest that many of them will appear as policy but will be political in their nature. I hope not but the government has already indicated through a number of leaks to the media that it will be the case.
The choice revolves around how to actually stimulate an economy. I will speak about the northwest of British Columbia that has been in a recession for some number of years now. Some communities face upwards of 80% unemployment, while the government comes forward to say that there is not a problem it has not seen that a tax cut will not meet, and if one only has a hammer then every problem starts to look like a nail.
Companies in my region that had been suffering for a long time had not in fact been paying taxes because they had not been making profits. As the tax rate went down for corporations, they were not seeing any benefit coming back to them. Whereas when we were able to use part government and part private funding for a mill in Fort St. James for instance, 250 mill jobs are being saved and the workers are going back to work this week.
This is something that is about a choice, but the government seems so hooked to an ideology, that there is no other solution other than a tax rate measure rather than a true stimulus package and investment, which is being debated south of the border. I wonder what the member's thoughts are on the choices that are being made right now and have been made in previous budgets by the current ideological government.