Madam Speaker, I commend my colleague from Thunder Bay—Rainy River for his concern about the economy of northern Ontario. I have stated the case for my area of that wonderful part of the country.
Back in the sixties, 1,200 people mined ore and shipped it to Sault Ste. Marie and 12,000 people turned it into steel. That steel was then sent across the country where thousands of people made it into different things. Those things were sold to Canadians and we traded the leftovers. We had an interconnected economic system back then that saw everybody doing well. All our communities were prospering and supporting each other.
My colleague talked about the forest industry. Could he tell us a bit about how the forest industry worked back in the sixties and seventies and how we might get back to that kind of self-sufficiency again?