Mr. Speaker, I am proud to speak in the House today to this motion, with the work of my colleague from Nickel Belt and, in particular, the work of my colleague from Windsor West who has raised these issues again and again.
I am also proud to stand here as the member for the riding of Timmins--James Bay. My grandfather, Charlie Angus, came to Timmins from the Hawkhill tenements of Dundee and he died on the shop floor at the Hollinger mine. My mother's father, Joseph MacNeil, left with the waves of Cape Bretoners to work underground in Timmins. He broke his back in a fall of ground, which, in those days, was not even commented upon in the newspapers because life was cheap.
When my grandfathers were working underground, the average life expectancy for an east European man was 41 years of age, and that was considered a norm and considered perfectly okay by industry. I am here today to say that my grandparents' generation fought so that our communities would benefit and there would be a decent way of life in the mines in northern Ontario. We are not about to turn back the clock at this point, in 2010, and allow companies like Vale Inco and Xstrata to run our resources into the ground, and that is what this motion is about.
This motion is about the Conservative government's absolute failure to stand up for national interests. We have to condemn it for what has happened at Stelco, at Nortel, at Xstrata and at Vale Inco because that will be the template it uses on industry after industry, and Canadians need to see what is coming down the pipe.
I would like to say at the beginning that this is a very clear discussion. This is not about foreign investment. This is about scrutinizing foreign takeovers. I will give an example.
This week, the first diamonds ever from Ontario went on sale from the Victor diamond mine on the James Bay coast. I will tell the House about De Beers. De Beers came and built a billion dollar mine. It hired people and signed impact benefit agreements with first nations communities. I know there are people in some of my James Bay communities who do not believe that they got the best deal they could out of it, but I have worked with De Beers and when we won the fight to get a school in Attawapiskat, the CEO of De Beers called me that day and asked how his company could help.
That is foreign investment. That is something that we must welcome on all sides of the political House. We need to have an investment climate that welcomes companies to come in, invest and see the potential. However, there is something fundamentally different between the behaviour of De Beers and Vale Inco. There was a brutal, nasty, nine-month needless strike when the price of nickel would give Vale the kind of profits that its shareholders could be pleased with. Even more striking for me is that this week Xstrata is moving to shut down the copper refining and zinc refining capacity of Ontario.
This has to be really understood because the Conservatives were warned about this. Xstrata had a less than stellar record. In 2006 we were on the verge of seeing the merger of Inco and Falconbridge, which would have created, out of two world-class mining operations, a world-class super-operation. At the time, there was a lot of excitement and interest in the mining industry because of the synergies between Inco and Falconbridge, the kind of technical expertise. These were the most productive base metal mining companies in the world and they were on the verge of merging, but they were held up in a regulatory hurdle. That is when Xstrata, this corporate raider, came along to try to take Falconbridge.
At that time we pushed the government for a simple thing. We were not asking it to stop Xstrata. We were asking it, as government, because of the interest of these national resources, to hold off on allowing Xstrata to run away with Falconbridge until both bids were on the table. In June 2006, I asked the then industry minister a very clear question about the issue, of needing to have both bids on the table, and I spoke specifically about the fact that we were talking about the infrastructure of Canada's copper industry being picked off by this company that was set up in an unaccountable Swiss canton.
My colleague from Windsor West and the industry committee passed a motion calling on the government to hold off until both bids were on the table but the government, of course, laughed it off. In fact, the industry minister had quite a little chuckle at the time and said that he had not heard any rumours that it was going to get up and move the mines.
It shows how little the government understands the mining industry. No, it was not going to move the mines but it could move the copper ore, and that is exactly what is happening with Xstrata right now. Xstrata has come in and has sent a clear message. It is not interested in the traditional compact that we have had with industry, that it is going to develop the resources and process them in Ontario. It has very clearly said that it will not meet the environmental standards. It will shut down Sudbury if it wants to. It is shutting down Timmins and, unfortunately, I am warning my colleagues from Quebec, it will be shutting Rouyn-Noranda next. This is about moving copper to China and other places for processing.
This is a complete failure by the government. If we talk to anyone in the mining industry, they will say that what was allowed to happen under the present government with Falconbridge and Inco is the equivalent of the Avro Arrow. The development of the Sudbury basin will be permanently impacted because of the short-sighted lack of understanding of what was at stake here.
In my community of Timmins right now, 1,000 jobs are being lost right off the board and 4,000 jobs in the region. The loss of this refinery is sending a very clear message, and it is a message the government kind of likes, that our resource regions will now be treated like any third world jurisdiction because being open for business, it wants us to be open for the bad players as well as the good players. That is not the way we need to do business in this country.
My colleague from the Bloc spoke about ideology. The Conservatives are blinded, as G.K. Chesterton said, by the horrible mysticism of money. They believe that capital being allowed to do whatever it wants is the only social good. Therefore, if Xstrata comes in and tells our communities that they are just another third world jurisdiction, that it does not have any obligation to process resources and that it will ship it out, the government says that is fine because capital speaks.
If Vale comes in and tells the most productive mining workers in the world at Port Colborne, at Voisey's Bay and at Sudbury that they are now a disposable workforce, the government says that is perfectly okay. However, we know it is not okay. If we are going to see this complete lack of due diligence from the government on key sectors like mining, then what will happen when it starts to sell off our telecommunications and our tar sands lock, stock and barrel to the Chinese so they can just move the bitumen out and process it elsewhere? It is a lack of a national vision on which the government has to be held accountable.
The other day we lost the third largest OSB manufacturer in North American, Grant Forest Products. When our leader asked the Minister of Industry where the net benefit was to Canada, the minister could not even stand up and give us an answer on his own. He had to read from a press release put out by Georgia-Pacific. We are not Georgia. This is Canada. The government has an obligation when it reviews a sale, and that is not to say a sale will not happen, to ensure that the people who are buying up these resources will do so to the net benefit of Canada. It is a simple thing. I do not see why it has been so hard.
The motion before us today is very clear. The government needs to be held accountable because it blew it. I am calling on my colleagues from all parties to stand with us and say that what has happened at Vale, what has happened at Xstrata, what has happened at Stelco and what has happened with the tearing apart of Nortel has been a national tragedy and the government needs to take responsibility for it. It must learn the lessons of this and Canadians need to learn the lessons of ensuring that when we are dealing with our resources that there is a net benefit.
Canada has now dropped to 14th out of 17th in western countries in terms of industrial innovation. It is no wonder, because when we are a branch plant economy, the investments are not made. Statistics Canada tells us that Canadian operations are twice as profitable as the ones owned by foreign companies in Canada because we are just a branch plant economy. We have to do better than selling off our natural resources to the detriment of our communities. Our regions and our people have a right to benefit from those jobs, which is why our country needs to stand up for this principle. That is why the New Democrats put forward this motion. We are calling on all members of the House to work with us.