Mr. Speaker, of course, the member is well aware, being from British Columbia, that the job losses in B.C. did not start with the downturn in the U.S. economy. Those job losses have been going on for several years. People such as the CCPA have been talking about the fact that we need a proactive strategy for forestry in British Columbia.
The member rightly points out that, with raw logs, there are different issues between public and private lands. What I am urging is that the provincial and the federal governments work together to address their respective responsibilities around how raw logs continue to flow out of our province and are processed somewhere else.
When it comes to the elements that are in the current budget around forestry, certainly we welcome those elements, but they do not go far enough. I talked specifically about short-term responses to workers' needs, and employment insurance was an element that was absolutely not dealt with in terms of the way forestry workers are being impacted. The five weeks at the end does not help the forestry workers who simply do not qualify because of the number of hours that are required and being tied to a different labour market.