Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for St. John's East and I am proud to do so.
An interesting launching point to start off this discussion is to refer to what is happening in the United States and the protectionism measures in the stimulus package it has developed, not just the current one, but the past one. It also has a series of laws and guarantees in its legislation enshrined to protect its bus industry, its shipbuilding industry and its defence contract that covers a series of different procurements that are important.
One of the glaring examples of why this budget needs to be defeated to propose a stronger budget is a procurement policy in Canada, something that the United States and other countries do, that would be within good faith practices in North America based upon what the U.S. is doing.
We saw this come to a head in my area of Windsor and Essex county and Chatham Kent when a contract for almost a quarter of a billion dollars was recently awarded for a truck to be built for the military. Instead of awarding that contract or putting in the RFP to ensure Navistar would build it in Chatham, it is going to be built in Texas. It is unacceptable when a quarter of a billion dollars of procurement goes out this door to reward people in Texas.
Ironically, in 2002, I was fighting with the auto workers to protect that plant. The Liberal government at that time originally said that we could not do anything to assist or facilitate that plant to ensure it had a future. It denied all those things. It said that we could not do it under NAFTA and it used every excuse. However, it finally capitulated and we were able to successfully keep that plant going until today with a modest investment and that retooling was very successful. The money helped the plant develop for the future. It has had good jobs since that time and has paid for itself in spades.
Workers and their families have been able to live a solid life and donate to the United Way and other causes and actually return the investment to the taxpayers of Canada through income tax. We will now watch that plant go down and be eliminated, while at the same time we will be supporting a plant and a facility in the United States.
There are other examples of that by the current government in its past. The Conservatives have a history of it. The ecoAuto rebate program, for example, which is still in the program the penalty axe back. It is important to note the type of strategies the government does not acknowledge or fix. When that program was put in place it literally had Canadian taxpayers' money going to Japanese vehicles made overseas with the Yaris, in particular, getting the actual incentive.
It is very difficult to support a government that does not plan its position properly. We will see a lot of the stimulus exit this country. We will do what the Americans did when one of George Bush's packages went out, which was basically cheques to Americans. What they discovered was that only 10% of the money went back into the value-added American economy. The rest of the money was either saved or lost in banking scandals or exited the country as other manufactured goods were developed overseas.
The problem with supporting the government right now is that we are seeing a supposed rush to fix the problem that the government has denied for so many years. Over a series of years the government has not only denied but also worked against some of the issues that needed to be fixed. The manufacturing sector, for example, is an obvious one. Over the last five years we have lost nearly 300,000 jobs in manufacturing across this country. It did not just happen yesterday. It has been happening for a number of years in different successive industries.
Without supporting a sectorial strategy, whether it be the textile industry, which we watched collapse in Quebec, whether it be the auto industry in Ontario, Quebec and other parts of Canada, or whether it be the shipbuilding industry of the past, there was no sectoral development. Now, all of a sudden, there will be a solution to these things despite the Conservatives denying it for so many years.
It is important to note that people were setting off alarm bells. It was not just Parliament over the last number years. A motion from the Corporation of the County of Essex, which was passed December 10, 2008, called for the county to forward a letter to the Premier of Ontario and Prime Minister of Canada endorsing the position of the Ontario Mayors for Automotive Investment, as outlined in correspondence dated November 24, 200,8 calling for urgent action to address the crisis in the automotive sector. That was a follow-up to a series of requests in the past.
What happened after that is an issue of credibility and why the government cannot be trusted. On January 17, the Minister of Finance had this to say to the public:
What Dalton McGuinty is doing is the short-term, ad-hoc, subsidy thinking...the kind of old-fashioned thinking that's proven to be a failure of short-term, Band-Aid fixes for specific companies. It is a shell game...certainly for successful businesses that pay their taxes and then watch their tax money being used for specific choices that are made by politicians. Quite frankly, politicians aren't very good at picking business winners and losers.”
He was referring to the auto industry. Now he has changed his tune and says that he will be there but the problem is that the Conservatives do not really understand the situation.
When the county of Essex and others raised the issue of lost auto manufacturing jobs, the government chose to attack instead of putting in an actual plan or having an actual vision. We have seen the jobs disappear. Canada used to be the fourth assembler in the world and we are now down to ninth and losing even more. The government has ignored the reality of what is happening. It is important to note that its divisive nature is what has caused the lack of confidence.
What ends up happening next is that the government scrambles around asking what it should do now. The United States is implementing a bridge loan program. It drops its rhetoric of attacking the industry and driving away the possibility of future investment.
The Minister of Industry gets on a plane and goes down to Washington but does not really meet with anyone. I accessed his travel expenses and it cost $601, plus the cost of the challenger jet. We do not know how much that cost but I am sure it was quite expensive to fly that into Washington. All the minister gets is a document that could have been downloaded from the Internet. This is the actual system that the United States went through. It had open, accountable procedures to go through its automotive investment bridge loan that it was going to do.
We do not have that over here. We have not had a single public meeting. The government wants to put out billions of dollars but does not want to provide any access to the agreement. The only thing the minister has done is to attack workers by insisting that we would have the same conditions in our agreement as the United States.
The minister has given up our sovereign decision to even look at what a package could be. He has said that the senators from Alabama, the senators from Tennessee and the United States Congress should make the decisions for Canada as we put billions of dollars on the line.
What is worse than that is the fact that the government has still not come to the recognition that the year before the United States put $25 billion aside for an innovation research fund for the automotive industry to turn it green. What has happened in the meantime, as the United States has been doing those things, Canada has lost investment opportunities, which is unacceptable. I will point to one of the most successful ones.
Despite the Detroit three getting a bad name with regard to hybrids, they actually have the most hybrids on the market. Investments are happening right now. General Motors, because of this incentive program, is actually building a battery factory in Detroit. It is building the Volt as well, the first electric commercial vehicle that will hit the roads. However, that investment has gone to Detroit and the United States because they actually had an auto policy. Meanwhile, our government has not even had CAPC meetings. We actually passed a call to action plan that was supposed to be implemented back in 2004.
The Conservatives do not need to be supported anymore. Too many workers and their families have lost their jobs, not because they have not been productive, not because they have not gone to work every day and done everything they should and not because they have not had the opportunities, because we have had those opportunities, it is because a government policy was never developed.
Ironically, in this budget the government claims it will come up with one in a couple of weeks. For years the government has said that it actually has a policy and now it says that it will table a policy in a few weeks and that we should trust them. We are supposed to trust them with billions of dollars, with no accountability, no plan, no public meetings, no action, no type of input and, at the same time, it will come up with a plan later on. It is too late.
We need a new plan and that is why we want to replace the government and see workers protected as opposed to being isolated and thrown out of their jobs.
