Mr. Speaker, as I was saying earlier about softwood lumber in my riding, we have a very diverse economy in northern Alberta. It is supported by three flags: the oil sector, the forestry sector, and the farming sector.
What a lot of people think, when they hear that, is that so-and-so works in the oil sector, so-and-so works in the forestry sector, and so-and-so works in agriculture. When we look at it from Ottawa, that is what it looks like, but when we get on the ground, it is often much more the case that it is a mixture of all three. For example, one of my constituents works as a local farmer. His family owns a dairy farm. However, I know that he also works as an auto mechanic on the farm as well. He takes some customers from off the farm and works on their trucks, for example. He also services eight or nine gas wells right around his home. That is an interaction between the farming community and the oil and gas industry.
I know many farmers who are good at running equipment. They have grown up driving tractors, running the combine, digging drainage ditches with the high hoe, and clearing land with the Caterpillar, and those skills they learned on the farm are then translated into jobs in the oil patch. Often many of those people will be building roads in the oil patch. They continue to farm during the summer. During the winter, they go off and take an oil patch job.
Others take on a job with the forestry industry. Many farms in northern Alberta will have a logging truck parked on the farm somewhere. People will subsidize their farm with some logging income. Many of them already own a big truck to haul grain, and they learn those skills that can be translated into a job in a logging operation. All of these things come together.
Others will be in the service industry. I talked earlier about my friend Mark from Whitecourt. He works predominantly in the forestry sector. However, I know many people, including another friend of mine named Yelte. Many of the trucks he works on will be related to the oil patch, many will be for the farming community, and many will be for the logging operations that happen.
All of these together make up the vibrancy of northern Alberta, the vibrancy of the northern economy. The products that are produced in one sector are often used in another sector.
One of the things we were talking about was the very fact that some of the pulp and paper by-products are then used in the oil patch. For example, the Alberta Newsprint Company produces hundreds of thousands of litres of water through their processes. They can sell that water, and it gets used in the oil patch. It is all an intermixing.
If a log comes into Whitecourt on a logging truck, 99% of that log will be used, but it may be used by up to three or four, or maybe 10, different companies that get their hands on it before it is shipped out in the various products that get shipped out of Whitecourt.
Softwood lumber is integral to our rural communities. It is integral to life in northern Alberta. I ask for government support on this motion.