Mr. Speaker, I thought you had paid close attention to my speech. I am disappointed that you thought it was my colleague from Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup who was speaking. I understand that we look a lot alike and that sometimes people mistake him for me. However, I will try to get over my disappointment.
I appreciate the question from my colleague from Kenora. When I worked for Abitibi-Price, there was a plant in Smooth Rock Falls, Ontario. In northern Ontario, there were plants and sawmills in Kapuskasing, Timmins and Kenora. These plants are often set up in smaller communities, far from major centres. Have you ever wondered why there were no sawmills or paper plants on the outskirts of major centres like Montreal, Toronto or New York? It is because the raw materials, like the black spruce in Quebec and Ontario, grow far from the big cities. That is why the paper companies build their sawmills and paper plants in the middle of the forest, so to speak.
Often, these are single industry towns. And these are the communities that suffer when a sawmill or paper plant is shut down, as we have seen in Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Abitibi and elsewhere. That is why a plan shutdown is an economic disaster. The people cannot go and work elsewhere. They cannot take the Prime Minister's advice. He once suggested that if the unemployed in the Maritimes were fed up with being out of work, they could go to Alberta, where there is plenty of work. But you cannot uproot someone like that.
The Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec and member for Jonquière—Alma has also suggested that people in Quebec who do not have work should go work in Alberta. Is he forgetting that, first of all, there is a language barrier for Quebeckers? Not everyone is fluently bilingual. What is more, people in more remote communities cannot pick up and move as easily as that. We are not talking about a tent trailer you park at a campground. We are talking about human beings and families.