Mr. Speaker, last week, with my former and, let me stress, future Brant MP, Lloyd St. Amand, I toured a dozen-plus abandoned or scaled-back businesses in Brantford. These closures represent hundreds of lost jobs. It was sad.
However, one person said, “Not so. We've taken over one of those plants, so it is a wonderful story”.
I congratulate Brant Screen Craft for the expansion of its company, for making use of the emptied Crane facility, and for creating jobs. That part of the story is indeed excellent.
the purpose of the tour, however, was to highlight the still far greater preponderance of losses. Being able to use the Crane facility is good but the fact that Crane had to close and all those jobs were lost is, I repeat, sad.
I have asked the folks at Brant Screen Craft to give credit where it is due. They said that their corporate tax cuts were responsible for their decision to expand and it was in fact the Liberal government that drastically reduced corporate taxes from 29% to 19%. I am glad that our years of Liberal work in making that competitive helped Brant Screen Craft.