Madam Speaker, I want to take a moment to thank my colleague from Newfoundland and Labrador for a very instructive speech. I learned a great deal.
Perhaps the member could help us answer one question. At what point in Canadian history does he think we made this conscious choice to abandon the shipbuilding industry as some smokestack industry that we no longer want any part of?
In my own union alone, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, we used to have 35,000 members who worked for the Burrard Dry Dock Company in Vancouver alone and produced one ship a week in support of the convoy to keep Great Britain alive during the second world war. We were building a ship a week with 35,000 members of my union.
At what point and by what pretzel reasoning did they abandon that kind of domination of the industry and forego it to other countries?