Mr. Speaker, I wish I could give everybody great hope. I am from the city of St. Thomas where, back on January 23, 2006, the day of the federal election, Ford Motor Company announced that it would be reducing down to one shift. On October 14, 2008, our next federal election, the Sterling truck plant announced that very day that it was closing. Therefore, I come from a city and region that has felt this economic impact so greatly, and that is what I want to focus on. We do need hope here, but we also have to have some reality checks. Tonight is going to be a difficult debate. I have seen so many families who have gone through this.
As I have always mention in this House, I was the proud assistant of Joe Preston, the member of Parliament from 2004 to 2015, and that gave me the opportunity to work with so many individuals who had worked at the Ford Motor Company and the Sterling truck plant. These were very difficult times. People were coming in and saying they had lost their jobs. They usually blamed it on the government, which I understand because, at the end of the day, there is some part that the government has to play. That is why, when we have talked about competitiveness and about tariffs, all of those pieces are part of the puzzle and we cannot forget that.
Back in 2006 when it was announced, it was a very difficult day.
In 1967, the Ford Motor Company came to the city of St. Thomas and people leaving high school were able to get fantastic-paying jobs. Students were able to pay for their college and university, just based on their summer jobs there. People were able to work Fridays and Saturdays for 12-hour shifts and, once again, pay for their university and college. There were so many opportunities, and all of those opportunities disappeared when the Ford Motor Company disappeared.
It was the same thing with the Sterling truck plant. In 2008, it announced that it was leaving. As I said, it was the federal election day. It seemed to always happen to Joe and me as we were working on these federal elections. We just did not know what was going to happen. In 2011 and 2015, when we escaped with no terrible announcements, we were very pleased.
We have to recognize it is not just the 2,800 jobs, but it is also all of those secondary and tertiary jobs that really matter. It is much greater than the 2,500 unionized staff and the 300 non-unionized staff. That is why I want to speak about the challenges we saw in St. Thomas as well.
The day that the Ford plant closed in St. Thomas, it was noted in the Financial Post, “Making matters worse is that a number of Ford’s suppliers in the area, including Lear Seating, have also announced they will be closing their own doors as a result of the plant’s demise.”
We still have about one in four jobs in St. Thomas that are tied to manufacturing, and many of those are still in the automotive parts. In that year, we lost Lear and Schulman. Schulman did not deal with the fabrications per se, but with the plastics that had to do with the steering wheels. We lost people who worked in the cafeteria, who prepared over 4,000 meals a day. Those were great jobs and people knew they could go to work and get paid, but we lost them. One other huge part of our industry that was really impacted was Auto Holloway. I remember going to school with many kids whose parents worked at Auto Holloway. It had great-paying jobs. My brother worked for the company, and when the Ford Motor Company left, that job was gone as well.
We are not just talking about the cars once they are manufactured and shipped off; we are talking about the tires, the engines and all of the different parts of the cars that are brought in by CN Rail or CP or by the 400 road series. All of these jobs are lost as well. Therefore, today as we are talking about Oshawa and about the 2,800 jobs, we have to recognize all of the spinoff effects and impacts and ripple effects that this is going to have on that community.
It is important for the government to step up. I am hoping that during this emergency debate the Liberals will step up and work with the opposition parties that asked for this emergency debate. We need to make sure it is not just about employment insurance, but that it is about what we can do next. Employment insurance is a band-aid solution. Although Service Canada will set up in special areas where people will work with the workers, that has to be seen as a short-term fix. Employment insurance is only meant to get people through the rough spots.
This is where I really encourage the government to get a plan for how we can keep this company here in Oshawa and keep people working today, or how, in the future, the government can make sure that these jobs come back.
St. Thomas is in the county of Elgin. We are lumped in with the city of London when it comes to our unemployment rates. During the global economic downturn, we were able to separate that information. In the county of Elgin, in the city of St. Thomas, we were at about a 15% unemployment rate. We had growing poverty, growing job losses, and people were losing their homes.
I had the opportunity to work with many of these people. There were a lot of crying parents. That year our office bought Christmas presents for families we had met. This is what the people of Oshawa are going to go through, not this Christmas but perhaps next Christmas. It is really important that the government is listening, and asking, “How can we do things better?”
One of the things I have always heard is, “Our job as government is to set the field. It is to create the field and create all the opportunities for competitiveness.” This is really important. Our Conservative caucus is saying today that competitiveness has left the building.
It is really important that we recognize that tariffs are having an impact on many of our companies. We can talk about the CPP, about all of the new costs to business. We are seeing this across the country. I truly hope that the government recognizes that until it changes the manner in which it is doing business, this may be the first but it may not be the last. We have to be on top of that.
We also need to talk about labour and talent. We recognize that there are great workers who have worked there. We have talked about some of the products that have been taken off the line. I am sure many of the people in this room tonight and many of the viewers watching at 9:55 p.m. on a Monday evening can remember the Crown Victoria. It is the cop car that we see across Canada. For many years, people in St. Thomas could sit there and say, “That's my car. That's my car. That's my car.” Every time I see a Crown Vic, I know it came off the line in St. Thomas, Ontario.
I have the feeling that the people who work in Oshawa are feeling the exact same way. Many individuals take great pride in the work that they bring forward. Today, as our member for Carleton mentioned, we have to remember the children and the families that are being impacted.
I am going to go back to another conversation I had. Many years ago, we did a lot of round tables. We always dealt with manufacturing. As I indicated, one in four jobs in the city of St. Thomas are with manufacturing. One of the biggest things that one of our companies said was that if they could move today, they would, but they could not, they were here, and they had everything set up.
One of the biggest issues for him was the cost of hydro. That is something the Province of Ontario is really working on, and I am really proud of the work that they have done following this last administration's failures.
We also have to understand employment costs. These are really big factors as well. It is really important. I understand that this is a balance between labour rights and family, but we also have to look at the work in the companies to make sure that they are productive. We have to find that balance.
I do not know if the government is consulting enough to make sure that we are actually on the right path all the time. Those are some great concerns of mine.
My final message is that we do have to stay positive. This is a very difficult situation that many of our workers are going through. They are going to be left without jobs. They are going to be left with mortgage payments and bill payments that do not cease just because they have lost their jobs. If they are like the government, they will have credit card bills to pay as well.
There are many things that we need to think about. We need to come up with a plan. I am not saying I am the right person for the plan, but there are 338 members of Parliament who should care enough about Canada and care enough about our economy that, together, we can come up with a non-partisan plan that will keep these people working in Oshawa, and that will keep this country the great country it is.