Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Hamilton Mountain for sharing her time with me. I know, with the situation that has happened in her riding, that she could have spoken for 20 minutes, if not two weeks, on this subject about how her riding and the families in her riding are being affected by the net benefit of the Investment Canada Act.
I also thank my leader from Toronto—Danforth, the leader of the New Democrats, for bringing forward this motion. He is the only leader listening to the people in my riding and the people who have been affected by foreign takeovers from Timmins to Hamilton to Saskatchewan and right across our great country.
The motion that he introduced wants to ensure that we review foreign investments more publicly, transparently and make it accountable to Canadians. That means a lot to the people who are affected by foreign takeovers.
We need more than just the government's word that a foreign takeover will be good for a community. Clause (c) of our motion wants to ensure that:
...all conditions attached to approval of a takeover be made public and be accompanied by equally transparent commitments to monitoring corporate performance on those conditions and appropriate and enforceable penalties for failure to live up to those conditions;
To me and to the people in my great riding of Sudbury, this is something we wanted to find out all along.
When Inco was taken over by Vale and Falconbridge taken over by Xstrata, there was some concern in my community as to what this would mean to their jobs, families and livelihoods. At first, things seemed okay, but then the economic crisis happened. It seems that many corporations used this crisis as a way to bend some of the rules and have layoffs. In February 2009, Xstrata laid off 686 miners, which meant that 686 families were affected by this net benefit Investment Canada Act and the decision made by Xstrata.
What did we do as good parliamentarians? We said that we would look at the rules and see what could be done to ensure Xstrata was not breaking its agreement and that it was following the rules of the Investment Canada Act. What happened? We were told that we could not see it. We were told to trust the government because it did this with the net benefit of Canada in mind.
When I have 686 miners in a room trying to explain to me how their families will be affected, there was no net benefit for them. There was no net benefit for the store owner who ended up losing business because these people no longer had a job. There was no net benefit for the teenagers of these families who were hoping to go to college but instead had to take a job at Tim Hortons, or something along those lines, for a year to hopefully save enough money so that they could go to school.
There are only so many times as politicians that we can sit in our office and see a grown man cry because he does not know how he will keep his house or keep his family together. That is what this Investment Canada Act has done to my community. It has not shown the net benefit necessary.
For the people of Saskatchewan, I think we have been able to wipe our brow and say “whew”, because we have seen the examples. Sudbury, unfortunately, is an example of what happens when we do not know what it is we need to combat when decisions are made by foreign companies.
Xstrata and Vale made decisions, and we can respect those decisions, although we may disagree with them, but if we want to know what legislation or what agreement they were talking about, we cannot see it. That is what gets people in my riding of Sudbury scratching their heads.
People look at this House and recognize that some of us may be wearing a different colour tie, we may represent different parties and we may have different philosophies but at the end of the day we all represent them. Why is it that we cannot see agreements signed by the government with a foreign company to find out how they will affect our livelihood? That is what gets people scratching their heads.
No matter where the ownership of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan ends up, there must be a better deal for Saskatchewan from the development, mining, processing and sale of this strategic resource. Stopping the BHP takeover is the first step in helping make that happen, because the last thing we want to see is more of the losses, more of the negative side of the Investment Canada Act.
We are talking about transparency commitments to monitoring corporate performance on those conditions and appropriate and enforceable penalties for failure to live up to those conditions. When we lost 686 jobs at Xtrata, when we had 400 layoffs at Vale, and when we had a strike for over a year, there was no way we could find out if there should be any type of penalty enforced on these companies because we could not find out what the agreement entailed.
That is the unfortunate thing about this. How do we know if the agreement said that there could be no layoffs and no strikes for the first three or four years or there would be penalties? We do not know. Maybe the companies should have been forced to make some payments and suffer some penalties that could have offset some of the costs that these laid off workers were experiencing. However, when we do not know we do not know how to deal with the situation.
Maybe the agreement was of benefit to the corporation and the government but we do not know. The reason we are asking for transparency is so we can go back to our constituents and look the people in the eye who are being affected and say, “This is the agreement. This is what the government signed on your behalf. You can agree or disagree with it, but this is what the agreement is right now”. People could respect that, but when we hide behind this wall with no transparency, the people who have lost their jobs just do not get that.
What we are hoping for is that this motion will start the talk and bring forward the commitment to ensure foreign investment enriches our communities instead of hollowing them out. I could look three hours to the west of Sudbury, my hon. colleague from Sault Ste. Marie can attest to this, and we have had a foreign investment with S.R. Steel. I do not know all the details of the agreement with S.R. Steel like I do with Vale and Xtrata, but S.R. Steel has become a good corporate citizen in that community. It is involved with its United Way campaign, and as the former executive director of the United Way in Sudbury, I know it is involved there as well. It has been involved with trying to maintain the Huron Central Railway. It has been an advocate to ensure that we keep this vital link between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. It is ensuring that its employees have an opportunity to have a say in discussions.
When we look at what happened at Vale and Xtrata with the takeovers from Falconbridge and Inco, the miners who are actually down 7,000, almost 8,000 feet below the surface working for this company, would they not know what is best to ensure that the company is being profitable and find ways of improving production? Would they not know how to work with their foreman? Instead, these people have been completely kept in the dark. They have not been told what they can get involved with. They have not been told how the company is being affected, because again, the Investment Canada Act is hidden. It is not transparent.
That one part of our motion today is critical, in my opinion, to ensuring that we can bring forward this issue and end the hidden agenda, it seems, that is coming forward with the current Investment Canada Act.
Many times I have sat in my office with many of the miners, laid off miners and people who have been affected by the corporate takeovers and they always ask what they need to do to get this information out. I tell them that they need to continue to advocate on their own behalf because it is our belief that this motion to ensure that the act is more transparent will protect workers and families, and, if we get the right type of investment, we can create jobs, technology and research development.