Mr. Speaker, the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek has been a strong advocate for Canadian workers and Canadian jobs. I wish we had more members like him in the House. We have 37 members like him, but we need to have 137 so that these kinds of sellouts actually stop. We are working on it. The number of members providing strong representation for workers has tripled in the House over the past few years. If it triples again, we will not see any more of these sellouts.
It would be an important step in the Canadian Parliament to stop the Ottawa bubble and actually start thinking about ordinary people across this country, rather than just corporate CEOs and bankers, which is what Liberals and Conservatives seem to love. They love giving money to bankers and corporate CEOs. They do not seem to think very often about the hard-working ordinary Canadians who pay their taxes and actually pay their salaries.
The question asked whether this issue had been raised. It was raised in committee repeatedly by every single representative from the shipbuilding industry, both owners and workers. It was every single one. The member is quite right to point this out. We have Liberals and Conservatives not even bothering to listen. They do not even bother to listen to the impact of their decisions. They did not even want to read the bill. They just wanted to push it right through.
In fact, Liberals moved to cut off witnesses. We had Liberals and Conservatives saying that they did not really want to hear from shipbuilding representatives. They did not really care about that. Somebody said that there were going to be some benefits in this deal, and even though there had been no economic analysis whatsoever, they were just going to pass it through, throw it on the House of Commons and see what happened.
That worked really well for the softwood sellout, did it not? Thousands upon thousands of jobs were lost because members in the House did not do their job. We told them what the impact would be: hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, softwood communities devastated, closures of mills and money going down to the United States. What did they do? They voted it through. We are giving them a last chance to do the right thing.