Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his question. Our party does not oppose that, not at all. We would like to see it in every agreement. It is nice to stand up here and say that we have free and fair trade but we should get it straight in peoples' minds that there is no such thing as free. There is trade, yes, but if we want a level playing field, and our party has always stated this, we must have the same conditions. We cannot expect to compete against a wage of $4 an hour, which is not necessarily the low wage in China but probably the higher wage, extremely high. I used the $4 example because people can understand it better than $1.25 or $1, which would probably fit better into the category of China.
We believe that if we are to go into these agreements we should all have the same type of playing field. Until such time as we do, we will always have unfair trade practices, whether it be child labour or things such as the Kyoto accord, which the member's party gives great support to without looking at what the impact would be on the monetary system and on our own companies here in Canada. Yet we will blindly rush through and blindly say this is what we will do when other countries are not signing on to that accord and do not have to come up to anywhere near the same standards while they pollute just as much or worse than Canada does.
All this plays into affecting trade, into whether or not companies will make a profit and whether or not they can compete on the world stage. When we put restrictions in place and decide to do this against the companies here in Canada, how on earth can we expect to prosper on the world stage? How can we be expected to compete in this situation?
I do not know of anyone who goes into business, particularly when competing in the world market, who says they will go into business but fine, penalize them five times the points that the competition will be. They just do not do that. Most people, when they invest in companies or when companies start up, have an understanding of what the agreement is at the time they make their investment. They know through their own calculations before they do this whether or not they will make a profit in a year or two. Then the government comes along and decides they have to compete against companies that perhaps have to pay only one-third or one-fifth the wage and do not have to live up to the same environmental standards or pay the same taxes as they do. The government says they will have to compete with them because it signed these agreements, without these issues being addressed properly.
Let me say again that I am not against trade. Fair trade would be really nice, if we ever had such a thing in this country, which we do not seem to have. For example, the United States, which has a lot of the same standards we do and some that are superior to ours, has a taxation level so much lower than ours that our companies have a terrible time trying to compete. Its bureaucracy and its red tape are so much easier to get through than ours.
This all pertains to trade in the world, but our government, and particularly this Liberal government, turns a blind eye to all of these facts. It turns a blind eye to the bankruptcies of people and companies who are trying to compete out there. The government just keeps wanting to put more restrictions in place. I have to wonder exactly where the government is coming from and where it is going.
There are a lot of people, including me, who are hopeful that through this agreement more light will be shed upon the practices in China. If that is truly the case maybe a lot of these concerns can be addressed, but I want to stress that maybe part of it. I have seen the government so often use the terms maybe and if. Both are hypothetical. I would like to know if the government were to review this in a few years whether it would back away from it. I highly doubt it. It seems that once it gets these practices in place it likes to penalize our business people as much as possible.
In closing, I have one word for the government. The government's fear is a fear of the independent business people of the country, for if they are independent they do not need--