Keegann,

Your thoughts are being relayed by the opposition in the ontario legislature debates and proceedings.

Here's yesterday's pdf

http://www.ontla.on.ca/house-proceedings/transcripts/files_pdf/25-FEB-2014_L105.pdf

below is a small portion from the hammering that Vic Fedeli unleased yesterday in the Legislature....the liberals are getting the crapped kicked out of them and are under a lot of pressure to act..

I can tell you, Speaker, again, it’s this lack of under-standing of the north. It’s this lack of planning. They talk about infrastructure, but Speaker, I was in the Ring of Fire only two weeks ago for my fourth trip there, and I can tell you, this is an enormous opportunity that is awaiting decisions on infrastructure.

Cliffs resources had their plan. I visited the camp when they had 85 people. Two weeks ago when I visited the camp, it was six people. They’re down to six people, and their job is to pack everything up and ship it home.

I also visited, in 2011, Noront resources camp. They had 125 people there. They had, on this last trip, again, only six people.

At least there’s hope on the Noront site. What they want right now is infrastructure. They’ve got a proposal, what’s called the east-west route, and it’s to ship the nickel that they can pull out of the ground in a shaft—pull the nickel out, ship it to Pickle Lake by an existing winter road; build a winter road to Webequie and ship the nickel towards Pickle Lake by the existing winter road. It’s an entirely feasible and plausible kick-start to the Ring of Fire. It’s one of those easy wins we can do right now. We can put some scores on the board. But they can’t get anywhere with this provincial government, which has dithered five years.

It’s so sad to have seen so many hundreds of em-ployees there and two weeks ago to see it dwindling down to only the dozen employees who were amongst these camps. It’s very sad. Why it’s sad is because two years ago, one of those companies spent over $200 mil-lion on drill bits and drill rods. I have 12 manufacturers in my riding that make those drill bits and drill rods. Some $200 million: It was unbelievable employment in our city only a couple of years ago. Last summer, I asked one of the companies, "How much are you spending drilling now?" and they said, "Zero." They went from $200 million to zero. Why? He said, "Vic, why would I continue"—and I don’t blame him for this, by the way—"to spend my shareholders’ money delineating our ore body when there’s no infrastructure existing to get my ore to market?"

As a consequence from $200 million to zero, we saw companies close in the city of North Bay. We saw Sandvik close, leave and move to New Brunswick—42 people unemployed there. We saw the other two major drilling manufacturing and drill rod companies have massive layoffs. We have very high unemployment in the city of North Bay today, amongst the highest in the north. Certainly, as you go farther north, it is considerably worse.

But the problem is we’re sitting, looking. I flew over the Ring of Fire before I landed and we looked at all of this opportunity. It’s sitting; it’s sitting almost on the surface of the ground there. Knowing that those riches can’t be tapped because there’s—you know, the ex-pression, "You can’t get there from here." Well, you can’t get that product out of the ground. It’s really sad to know that that is there. It’s a golden opportunity—in this case, a nickel and a chromite opportunity—that we’re missing in northern Ontario because this government has dithered on the infrastructure plan. They just can’t seem to kick it over the goalpost when it comes to northern Ontario. We saw that in their fire sale of Ontario Northland. We saw that in the Ring of Fire. We saw that when they shut down 10 tourist information centres, and nine of them were in non-Liberal-held northern ridings.

They don’t understand our infrastructure in the north. They said in the tourist information centres in the northwest, "Oh, don’t worry; you can use your mobile apps to get all the tourism info." It’s obvious they’ve never been north of Steeles Avenue, because there are many beautiful wilderness places that are not spoiled by telecommunications, so that you can’t have a mobile app. There’s no broadband; it’s beautiful and unspoiled. They don’t understand infrastructure. They certainly don’t understand infrastructure in northern Ontario.

Speaker, the solution that they seem to come up with all the time is tax and spend. Here in Toronto, their solution for infrastructure is to add 10 cents a litre in gas. I read a member’s statement only a couple of hours ago—three hours ago—that talked against that, with all of the members from the north fighting hard to avoid that type of tax-and-spend infrastructure investment.