Mr. Speaker, I am proud to participate in this debate. It is very important, and I want to thank those who made it happen as well as the staff. I am speaking from Windsor, Ontario, from the traditional territories of the Anishinabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the special lands of the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomie.
If I walked out my door here, I quite literally could be in the United States in about a 15-minutes. On a daily basis, 40% of Canada's trade to the United States goes through Windsor. Even with the pandemic in its full thrust, about 5,000 trucks per day cross into the United States.
Part of the difficulty we are faced with is dealing with our borders and our dependency, and I will touch on that a bit later. It is important to acknowledge that Canada right now, our Confederation, is in many respects a failed state. I know you, Mr. Speaker, have been here for a number of years, and I will be coming up to my 19th year. I could never imagine that a federal government would disinvolve itself from responsibility during this pandemic.
There are a lot of reasons we have come to this point in time, but this is a crossroads. Examining ourselves as a nation shows our failure to protect the citizens we swore to protect. That disappointment comes from a number of different experiences through this process. I see a lot of hope and opportunity, and I will touch on those elements later.
For example, today, the Prime Minister raised the War Measures Act and Tommy Douglas basically as an argument against having responsible debate on a problem that needs to be fixed. It is important for us to disinvolve ourselves from personalized attacks. So many people hold health care as a central bond among ourselves from coast to coast to coast, a reason to be Canadian and to be different than many places in the world. Health care was from Tommy Douglas and it came from a specific evolved principled position. To use that argument at this time is unfortunate.
We are going through a difficult time right now in Ontario. We had over 4,000 new cases today. The decision about who gets a ventilator and who does not is a very difficult one. It is very important for me to acknowledge all those who have lost a loved one, a family member or co-worker during this pandemic. This will haunt people for the rest of their lives, such as what they could have done to stop one more of those deaths or could they have done better to respond to the crises? In my riding, I had to call for help from the Salvation Army and the armed forces to go into a long-term care facility that had a significant outbreak because of the irresponsible actions of its management. We lost people.
I also worry for other people as well. For example, Asian hate crimes are on the rise, not only in Canada but in the United States as well. I worry about variants coming from different parts of the world. The continued collective assault by some on others has been unacceptable. We have to put this aside and work better together. If we are distracted by those things, they will complicate our situation.
I want to touch on a very important issue in my area. I want to thank the member for Vancouver Kingsway for his work on this. He has raised this a number of different times. It is the demise of manufacturing. As a representative of the auto sector, I have seen it myself. I have seen us slip from number three or four in the world to number 11. It has been going on for long time. We were told that it was globalization and that we could nothing about it. We thought that divestment and lowering corporate taxes would bring different investment, but it never did.
We saw the planned loss of Connaught industries, a Canadian manufacturing facility that would have provided some solutions. What we have done is created a dependency. Located a few kilometres from where I am are auto plants that produced Second World War materials to help us during a time of crisis.
During this pandemic, I cannot lose sight of the fact when the Prime Minister was in London, Ontario, 200 kilometres up the road from here, he said that we had to transition out of manufacturing. That was back in 2015. That rang hard for a community that was fighting to save it jobs, its tool and die and mould making, its automakers, all those things. Ironically, we really kept some of those things in the Ford plant. Although diminished in its capacity, it produced PPE. Hiram Walker and other types of businesses struggled through this, and some had to restart.
Manufacturing is a critical component for our future as part of our domestic national security. As a New Democrat, I have been saying for many years that we need national policies on some of these things. That does not mean overtaking provinces like Quebec or other areas, because manufacturing takes place as far as B.C. What it means is supportive, comprehensive, measurable programs. We used to have some of those to make sure we are doing those things.
The SARS issue is a great defeat for us. Not only did we actually find out what we needed to do at that point in time, but we did nothing. We let things rot away and we let other people become the dominant producers of those things and more dependency has evolved.
One of the things I have asked for in terms of a process for solutions is a national strategy for manufacturing so we actually have measurables and tangibles. What does that mean? It means the production of real goods and services. It means innovation where our patents are no longer shipped out of this country and producing goods and services that we have to buy back. We spend millions upon millions of dollars every single year to develop patents and innovation at our research facilities, at different industries that get tax credits, and there is no accountability of that innovation leading to production and jobs in our own economy.
That has to be something that is going to be a focus for ourselves, and we should be measuring the results against our money that we see going in there. Then those companies that are doing that need to get rewards, whereas others need to be moved against, in terms of not getting the supports that are necessary for basically allowing our production to dissipate and go somewhere else.
We fought here, under five kilometres from here, for Canadian innovation, where a federal grant from the Liberal government of millions of dollars went into a plant, and the plant took that technology and innovation and shipped it to Mexico and now sent the jobs to Mexico, too, including innovation. These things would not happen if we actually had a planned economy for these things and for manufacturing vaccines, which are very important.
There are other things that need to be done. There is no doubt that the pandemic is costing us a lot of money and our finances are going to continue to struggle in many respects.
As the industry critic and someone who has put forward the telecom policy, I can tell you that it would be more advanced in terms of connecting Canadians, especially when we look at the fact that we have some of the highest fees in the world and some of the biggest challenges because of geography, but we have control of it. Federal Conservative and Liberal governments have taken in about $25 billion in spectrum auction fees over the last number of years; $25 billion have come into government coffers, and at the same time we pay some of the highest fees.
I see this in communities like mine, with a high rate of poverty, which have to basically decide which kid gets to go to classes, who goes online, what businesses can afford things and how they can compete and stay together. What is important is that this is an essential service. It was before the pandemic, and it is now, but when we look at students and social equality and inclusion, being online is an important factor that needs to be resolved right now.
Right now the federal government is going to take in billions of dollars more in a spectrum auction and not have any terms and conditions for connecting Canadians who are in rural and remote areas. This is something that has to end. We have to give people opportunity and connection. It is about civil liberties, because it is about the right to be connected in society right now. It may not seem like the biggest issue at the moment, but if we have a pandemic that continues and variants that continue, then we need to connect Canadians much more strongly than ever before. We have that opportunity, and that should be a solution sought as part of our national infrastructure, as part of our identity, as part of something we can do. No jurisdiction should be left behind. There is no doubt that we have to do that.
I want to conclude by thanking all the health care workers who have been out there working on the front lines. We think of our doctors, nurses, PSWs and all those in those profile spots. They are so important and we are so grateful for them every single day, but let us not forget the young people who have to work in grocery stores. In an area like mine that is in the hot zone, there are kids who go into the grocery store, not getting any more pay, probably not getting the training they deserve, and they are making a subpar wage to feed the rest of us. I could go on for days with regard to migrant workers and so forth and the issues there, but we have to change the way we do things. There has to be fairness and equality.
To pay for this, we need to have a profits on the pandemic pay. There are too many companies that have done so well and have so generously padded themselves, had salary increases, had CEO bonuses and a number of different things. It is their turn to return that back to our country.
If we do not do that, then we will continue to be a failed state. It is up to us as federal representatives to make sure we are unified. How do we do that? Let us find the things that can do it for us and our families, because too many of our people have already lost their lives and we cannot get that back, but we can stop more.