Madam Speaker, while my friend down the way and I have some common ground in disliking this bill, we come at it from different angles. I am not sure that increasing foreign ownership and control of the airline industry in Canada is actually the silver bullet that maybe some Conservatives hoped for, because if what we are hoping for is to have a strong aviation sector in this country, perhaps we need an actual strategy to build up the jobs and the workforce in this country, as radical as that notion sounds.
One of the concerns I have with these centres of excellence that are being dangled out by the government is that one wonders what we are training these workers for if, at the same time, the same government is moving those same jobs overseas. I do not know if they are teaching Spanish at these schools, but it might be a thought for the government.
The sequence of events is this, and this is my question for my friend. New Democrats had many criticisms, and were joined by Liberals in the criticisms at the time, of the Conservative government not enforcing the act, not enforcing the law under which Air Canada must operate. I can remember the member for Papineau standing in front of the House of Commons and in Montreal and in Mississauga and in Winnipeg, saying that if people voted Liberal, Liberals would uphold the law. There was a little asterisk on that. He did not mention that, in the meantime, when forming government, they would change the law so there would be nothing to uphold.
In fact, he was not technically lying. He was not technically lying when he said there would be sunny ways; he just did not mention the storm clouds that were on the horizon. The sun was out for a moment, but when push came to shove and Air Canada wanted something that Air Canada has long wanted, and Bombardier wanted something else, the quid pro quo came up and now it is the so-called seriousness of governing, where the 2,600 families and the jobs that they rely on in Mississauga, in Winnipeg, and in Quebec around Montreal are now to be sacrificed for this grand deal.
My question is this. If the Conservatives were unwilling to enforce the law and the Liberals were willing to simply kill the act, is it not now at least time for this country to face up to reality and, to be truly competitive, actually create a national aviation strategy that workers and Canadians have been so long calling for, rather than these cynical shell games that we see across the way?