Mr. Speaker, the member always does a thoughtful and thorough job when he speaks.
The member's colleague who spoke earlier this morning spoke passionately about Atlantic Canada and some of the challenges it faces. I live in a region of the country, northern Ontario, where we are experiencing some really serious challenges as well. If we do not have something done soon, there are communities that will no longer be viable in that wonderful neck of the woods because of an approach that has been taken over a number of years now.
In light of the collapse of the financial system last year, we have a chance to take another look at that. We used to be fairly self-dependent in northern Ontario and across Canada in terms of resource-based industries, like mining and steel and forestry. We used to sell a lot of paper domestically. We used to sell a lot of steel domestically.
When I first was elected one of the big problems that confronted us in the agriculture industry was BSE. The problem was we had turned all of our producing capacity over to the U.S. When the border was shut down, we could not ship beef into the States to get it produced to sell it back into our own market.
In the member's view, is there any way that we might turn this around so Canada's industries—