Mr. Speaker, when we got elected in 2015, there was a dark cloud over the auto industry. The previous government really did not pay enough attention. We saw factory closings in St. Thomas, with thousands of workers laid off. We saw closings throughout the manufacturing sector. We saw a lot of factories close in Niagara, automotive or otherwise.
I had GM pensioners come to me in the early part of our first mandate worried whether the St. Catharines plant would stay open, after serving the community and being an employer of members of our community for a century. It is a shocking thing for a community, to be worried about something that has been at the heart of it for so long. I tip my hat, not only to this government, but also to the provincial government, for focusing on the auto industry and understanding it is a priority for the province and a priority for southern Ontario.
The Volkswagen announcement would mean 3,000 direct jobs and 30,000 indirect jobs. Those would be jobs throughout southern Ontario, the rest of Ontario and even into the neighbouring provinces as well. There was a heckle that it is going to cost billions of dollars in federal and provincial investments, but it is an investment. That investment will be paid off in less than six years, and it is for a plant that will be there for decades, a plant that will produce 400 billion to 500 billion dollars' worth of economic economic activity. I am going to say that again. This will be $400 billion to $500 billion, not million, in economic activity for a region that has seen so many factories move away and so many factories close.
Conservatives will say that they stand up for workers, but I ask where the action is on that. It has become awfully quiet. The heckling has stopped, but at the end of the day—