Mr. Speaker, the member has been front and centre on this issue.
In the U.S., the treaty will simply not go before Congress and has been set aside entirely. In the European Union, government after government after government have rejected a proposed treaty.
Thus what we have here is a Conservative government, with some Liberal allies, trying to push this agreement through at the worst possible time. Colombia is in an election period and impartial observers have talked about widespread fraud, fear, and coercion being used by the government to try to ram through a puppet election, and yet here we have the Conservatives trying to reward that government for bad behaviour on the electoral front.
The question that stands in the House is why are the Conservatives, at this worst possible time, trying to aggravate the human rights situation in Colombia rather than standing up to the Colombian government and saying that it needs to have free and fair elections, to stop the fraud and coercion and stop the fear the government is generating among the population, and to hold democratic elections in Colombia?