Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to follow my hon. colleague from Eglinton—Lawrence. It is also a little daunting to follow someone whose words flow out so quickly and so easily.
It is a great pleasure today to speak to the motion from the member for Ajax—Pickering. The motion is not a negative motion, as it is being perceived. It is actually a motion of encouragement.
While it points out that the government has failed in its relationship-building process with the Americans to the south, it is also meant to encourage and to promote the kind of relationship that Liberal governments of previous years tried to build. We would like to see this continued in the future. It is meant to foster both trade and people moving across the border. It is also meant to promote a safe and secure border for both countries.
I have listened to the various speakers today and I wonder why I approach this question somewhat differently from others. I think it is because of my background, growing up in Sault Ste. Marie. It is a border city, but a border city with a bit of a difference from other border cities. It is a border city where the Canadian side, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is five times the size of the Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan. That makes quite a difference in our understanding, our confidence, our self-respect and the way we look at the border. Growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, the border was always seen as something both special and ordinary. It was something extraordinary and normal.
We lived metres away from the border and on weekends or on special days, it would be fun to go across to the small town on the other side. However, we were really encouraging Americans to come over to our side to spend those American dollars. We wanted to get to know them. We wanted them to come to our businesses and our shops. We wanted them to come to our neighbourhoods. We wanted to invite them into our world. Especially when the American dollar was high, they loved to come over and spend those dollars in Canada. When the Canadian dollar was high, we learned that we could go over there and shop, and gradually over time, as a teenager, I began to understand that trade relationship.
I also understood that one did not always exploit comparative advantage. Even when gasoline prices were extremely low in the states, my father would remind me that my uncle owned a gas station. If we bought all our gasoline in the states, eventually there would be no gasoline stations in this country. He reminded me that the border did serve a certain purpose, to protect Canadians and businesses and to keep our livelihoods here.
The International Bridge opened up in Sault Ste. Marie when I was six years old, and that made crossing the border terribly easy. I do not want to romanticize those days too much, but we have to remember we all have a sense that the border is open. We have a sense of friendship when it comes to the Americans. We could cross easily. They could cross easily.
We do not live in that world today. We live in a much more dangerous and scary world. We want to both continue to protect the safe movement of people and goods across the border, but we also want to ensure that those who would do us harm, either people or goods, are stopped at our borders for our mutual protection.
The border then is that two-way mirror. On one side, it is a vehicle to promote the movement of people and goods. We also recognize it is absolutely critical and important that we stop certain things at our border and that the thickening of the border, about which people have talked, is meant to protect us as well.
In today's world, this is presenting a challenge to the government. The first step in that challenge is to build a relationship at the highest levels. We are expressing that the first failing of the government is to actually promote a relationship of easy, ongoing conversation where we talk about important things. We talk about them as friends, but we stand up for Canadian interests first.
The recent comments by the Secretary of Homeland Security regarding the border, and her misunderstanding and misinformation, just weeks after a visit from the Minister of Public Safety of Canada, tells us that our message is not getting through, that the vehicle by which we have our ministers travelling to Washington, and they seem to be going there daily these days, does not seem to be working.
Either they are not expressing our concern well or we are failing to make ourselves heard. Ms. Napolitano, the secretary, is misunderstanding something when she states that our border is porous, that somehow we are the source of terrorism in that country. It is simply not true.
It is not good enough that the minister said that he chuckled with her just weeks before about this issue. It is not good enough that they are buddy-buddy, sharing a joke. The point is to do business. The point is to present Canadian concerns, ideas, thoughts, technology and interests to Washington. It is not simply to chuckle about what may or may not be current urban myths.
We all know that people and goods are slowing down at the border. I was in Thorold earlier this week meeting with a group of citizens who were talking about the dependence of the Niagara peninsula on trade and people moving quickly and easily across the border. It is just not happening any more and Canadian jobs, whether it is the auto sector, agriculture sector or any part of the supply chain, all those parts of our economy are being slowed down because the border is slow. It is slow but we are not safer because of it. If we were safer because of it, we could perhaps put up with some inconvenience, but we are not safer.
People in my riding express concerns daily about the flow of handguns across the border. They are constantly concerned that we are not doing enough to stop at our border the kinds of things that we do not want in Canada. If anything, I think we in Canada have more to fear about what is coming across from the south than anything we are going to send from the north to the south.
Ten times the population, 20 times the crime and 30 times the malevolent behaviour in the south is what we need to protect Canadians from. We need to protect our citizens by ensuring our border is secure but I do not believe the government is anywhere near doing that.
I want to raise a couple of issues that have not been raised. One is with respect to the U.S. department of agriculture. In 1991, it established a user fee called the animal and plant health inspection service user fee and Canada was exempt from that fee. For 16 years, Canada did not pay an inspection user fee for agricultural goods going into the country.
In 2007, with no notice given, a new fee was imposed upon our rail and trucking carriers. For the rail industry, it is $7.75 a car. I know that does not sound like very much but that is $8 million a year for an industry that is already somewhat precarious and marginal. That is $8 million a year for a user fee going into the United States with no benefit for Canadians or Americans. It is a simple bureaucratic stroke.
The government was asleep at the switch and did not ensure that Canadian companies, farmers and consumers would be protected from those costs. It simply failed to look at it. I have asked the minister for a response and I am waiting for it. We need to ensure that non-tariff barriers to trade are stopped. The government needs to stand up for Canadians, Canadian businesses and Canadian citizens to ensure that we find a way to do business and trade well.
My constituents are also concerned about the number of times that people are profiled at the border based on their race, ethnicity and religion. My office receives calls daily from people who have been stopped at the border simply because their name ends in a vowel. They are held back, taken in for secondary inspections and interrogated differently than I would be interrogated. The colour of their skin, their religion and their place of origin may be different from mine but they are Canadian citizens. This is not only when Canadians go into the United States. They are also being stopped inappropriately when they return home. Our Canada Border Services Agency is turning a blind eye to this. We need to recognize that these are Canadian citizens who need to be welcomed back into their country, need to be given the respect they are due and that citizenship in Canada is indivisible.
These are border issues. These are why we stand, why we talk and why we want the government to address these issues.
