Mr. Speaker, I present today a petition signed by hundreds of people in the Timmins-Kirkland Lake region. It is apropos on a day when the United Steelworkers from Sudbury are here on the Hill, 11 months into a strike by the corporate bandit, Vale, which was able to buy one of the greatest mining companies in the world because of the failure of the government to do due diligence.
In particular, the petitioners are concerned about what happened with Xstrata. This month we have a thousand jobs being lost in Timmins. Our copper refining capacity in Ontario has disappeared. Our zinc refining capacity has disappeared.
The petitioners are calling on the industry minister , who should have been doing due diligence but instead was out hawking cleaning products for companies in his riding, doing commercials, to do due diligence on the foreign takeover.
Given the negligence of the government and the resulting damage that has been done to our base metals industry in Canada, the petitioners are calling on the government to open up section 36 of the Foreign Investment Act, to make clear the secret deals that the minister has signed with companies like Xstrata and Vale, so that the public can know that the government is actually on their side, that the government actually has a vision for resource development in this industry and in this country.
We call our ministers to a higher standard to represent the interests of Canadians rather than hawking products and doing infomercials in their ridings.