Madam Speaker, in my community in the Alberni Valley, we have seen raw log exports go up tenfold in 10 years. We now have the highest poverty rate in British Columbia. This is after 10 years of a Harper government. Now the current Liberal government says it has a plan of real action. This is what real action looks like right now: jobs leaving forestry communities. If we want to support this motion, which is support for forestry workers, that is creating jobs in forestry communities; that means stopping raw log exports and investing in research and development, marketing, and retooling in that sector and obviously coming up with a softwood lumber agreement, which is urgently needed.
I want to hear from my colleague and friend across the way. What does it take to create a sense of urgency when we had a community like the Alberni Valley and Port Alberni that had the highest median income in this country in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, sending buckets of money to Ottawa, and right now the communities are being left with nothing? There is no help, jobs are leaving our communities, mills are closing, and one-third of the children are living in poverty. What is it going to take to get real action?