Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak about the over 1,000 former employees of Wabush Mines in Labrador and Quebec who lost 20% to 24% of their hard-earned pension benefits. When Cliffs Natural Resources walked away from its iron ore operations in Wabush, it also walked away from its unfunded pension liabilities owed to workers.
Cliffs Canada, under the CCAA process, is liquidating assets for its creditors and being allowed to pass over workers' pensions, medical benefits, and deferred salaries already earned by workers. These workers spent decades building the company and the town they live in.
Cliffs Canada may have become unprofitable with the low commodity prices in Canada, but its resources in the U.S.A. remain profitable. I find it unacceptable that profits and assets can be shuffled across the border for years before a company can be assessed, yet CCAA can only look back through one year of a company's operations and it provides no mechanism to fully protect the workers.
When people work for a pension and benefits, they deserve to collect them—