Mr. Chairman, I was part of the government that brought in the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement twenty years ago, and if anybody had said to me twenty years ago that we would be having free trade with the United States and Mexico but not within Canada, nobody would have believed it. What we've done by putting barriers in place that balkanize our domestic economy is we've driven up the cost of doing business in Canada. We've cost ourselves jobs, we've put our Canadian industry at a disadvantage relative to foreign competitors.
TILMA represents an important step forward, but this is a two-province initiative that's being taken. We need to extend that. We need to put teeth into procedures and we need to see action taken by the private sector, by provinces, by the federal government to knock down internal barriers to trade in Canada. Consumers and business and governments alike will benefit from that, but we need leadership.