Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague is from a mining and smelting community and I am from a mining town. We are no strangers to heartbreak. We have seen mines close. We have seen deals go down. We have seen communities built up in the wilderness and then the capital falls because the price of ore drops. These things happen, but what happened with Falconbridge and Inco stands alone in the history of Canadian mining because so many people warned and predicted that if we allowed the potential merger that could have taken place to be ripped apart by a corporate raider, the long-term impacts would be devastating.
The government at the time told us, “Do not worry. There is a nickel boom right now. Everything is fine”. It showed the fundamental misunderstanding that it has, that just because there is a boom in mining does not mean there is not going to be a bust. There will always be a bust and it is who controls the resources at the time of the bust that becomes a central issue. Right after the takeover by the hostile corporate raider, Xstrata, and then Vale took over Inco, we hit the bust.
We lost 1,000 jobs in Timmins. We lost all our copper refining capacity in the province of Ontario because of the government. I would like to ask my hon. colleague what it meant for the people of Sudbury, when they knew and were warning the government that this deal with Falconbridge and Inco being taken over was a disaster in the making. What did they think of the refusal and the glib answers that they received from the government?