Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to join in the debate today on the NDP motion. The principle and intent of the motion is something that our party has no problem supporting. Hopefully, the way it is presented is seen by the government as a call to action.
It has been a strange day of debate. When we come to the House and wrestle with any particular issue, it is a political environment. When we look at what is taking place, with the severity of the closures and loss of jobs in both the plant in London and at Papiers White Birch, we would hope that the debate would rise above political rancour and that we would deal with what we could do better as a country to ensure Canadians would not lose jobs.
Nobody in the House wants to see Canadians lose their jobs. The political parties may have a different approach and a difference sense as to how best to ensure that most Canadians are able to work on a steady basis, provide for their families and grow in their communities.
The situation is London is not foreign to me. We had a plant close down just recently in Port Hawkesbury, the NewPage pulp and paper operation. It was a little different situation. It was owned by an American company and the operation in the Port Hawkesbury area was actually profitable. It made both newsprint and super calendar paper, the glossy paper used in catalogues and high end magazines. The mother company in Wisconsin filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and subsequently we lost the operation in Port Hawkesbury. It was truly unfortunate.
There were 600 jobs there, plus wood lot owners and spinoff jobs. The real sad part is those who were receiving pensions and approaching pension age lost their pensions. The pension at that particular plant was underfunded. I know the regulation of pensions is a provincial responsibility and it would fall under the realm of the province of Nova Scotia. Hopefully, the province of Nova Scotia will embark on a full review of the regulatory regime to ensure that if there are closures in the future, and inevitably there will be, that those pension plans are fully funded. They need to have enough in them so people who work in those industries, after working for 25 or 35 years, when it comes time to retire they will have what they planned and hoped to draw as a pension. That is the reality we face.
The situation in London is obviously different. When we see a company like Caterpillar reporting record profits, when its senior management and shareholders all benefited from record sales over the last number of years and when the revenue lines at the corporation continued to grow, we would have hoped that it would be able to share some of that success with its employees, and they were unionized employees.
One that did not make sense was Papiers White Birch. We knew that company was trouble. We knew the newsprint industry had certainly fallen off over the last number of years, and it had asked the workers to make concessions. It was a completely different set of circumstances in London. The business was in good shape, the company was making money, yet it asked its workforce to take a 50% reduction in wages. When the negotiations were going nowhere, the company locked the workers out and inevitably shut the plant down. Based on that decision, those jobs are going south to Indiana.
It is not just the loss of jobs but the loss of the technology as well. Much of that technology was developed here in Canada. It was developed over a number of years through incentive programs that prior companies would have benefited from, programs that were put forward by Liberal governments. Certainly the companies benefited from the approach on tax reduction. The workers did not benefit much, but the companies benefited from the tax approach the current government embarked on.
The loss of the technology, the loss of the jobs is certainly a devastating situation for those directly impacted. However, even more broadly, these are not just jobs for individuals but good-paying jobs within the community, jobs that certainly have spin-off effects. This will be felt all the way through that community.
I am a little disappointed with the response from some of the government speakers. The couple that have been up today have done infomercials, saying what they have done for the people of London. They talked about investments in parks and here, there and everywhere. That is unfortunate because the intent of this going forward is to help Canadian industry so that we can continue to grow the jobs here in Canada. When government members dismiss it as just a labour dispute, I think that is a disservice to the debate taking place here today.
There was a comment made that this particular deal, this particular acquisition, did not meet the threshold that would trigger an ICA review. Maybe that is something we should be looking at, whether or not the threshold is too high or too low. That is something that should be brought forward and discussed, and it could be looked at in committee.
Whatever the government might say, one thing for sure is that there are still 450 people out of work in London as a result. The jobs and technology have just moved south. No matter what the government says, that is the reality of the situation.
I would hope that the government would see the sense in this motion and maybe support it. We know that this problem has been identified before. We can look at what transpired over a year ago in Saskatchewan with the potash situation there. We know that at the time the then-minister, who is currently President of the Treasury Board, said that the situation warranted a full review of the act by a parliamentary committee. That is what he had promised at that time.
The act is 35 years old. Certainly the economy has changed. The business world has changed. Where we are as a nation has changed. After 35 years, it should be reviewed. The then-minister had committed to that at the time. Since then, he has done nothing. The current minister is saying “No, the legislation as it stands is adequate”.
We are not going to solve all of the problems here in the debate today, but there is one thing that I hope this debate will do. The government has the full intellectual horsepower of the bureaucracy, the federal bureaucrats. Hopefully it will be able to tap them to come up with some type of a plan or strategy that would make sense, so that going forward Canadian jobs and technology will be protected, so that we will not see this happening again to these workers, communities and industries.
I hope the government supports the motion today and sees it as a call to action so that we can get some movement and some action on this particular issue.