Mr. Chair, the comments from across the way demonstrate that the Liberals do not even understand what free trade is. They think free trade is a group of political grandees getting together in a faraway land and deciding how to spend other people's money through complex international institutions unaccountable to the people who pay for them. That is what this so-called Asian infrastructure bank is. It will take a total of $100 billion in tax dollars, from working people around the world, and put it into the hands of a well-connected, well-lobbied for, well-lawyered few. They will be able to use that money to secure loan guarantees and loans, and the losses that will result from projects gone bad will then fall on the backs of the world's taxpayers, of which Canadian taxpayers will be responsible for half a billion dollars.
That's not free trade. What the government doesn't understand is that countries don't trade—people trade. Individuals buy things from one another across borders. In a true free-trading economy, the government should remove the barriers to the flow of goods and services across those borders. It should not forcefully expropriate the money of the taxpayers in those countries to provide financial assistance to wealthy international investors well connected enough to get their hands on it.
That is effectively the difference here. We believe in voluntary exchange, where buyer and seller trade things because each believes they are better off with what they get than with what they had. They believe in forcing people to contribute to projects they don't support and often don't even know about in faraway lands they've never been to.
We are going to continue to support true free trade over here on this side of the House of Commons, and not these programs of socialism for the wealthy and the well connected.
Thank you.