I come from a rural area in the writing of Berthier—Maskinongé. It's an area where one finds furniture companies, textile companies -- industries which have been weakened -- and many farm operations. Because of free trade, bilateral agreements and globalization, those rural areas are facing major difficulties leading to job losses and the empoverishment of the population. Rates of unemployment keep increasing and people move to the cities because they lose their jobs, among other reasons. With the arrival of free trade, the WTO and those bilateral agreements, among other things, I see that those rural areas are slowly losing their population and that those people who remain are becoming poorer.
You mentioned Mr. Murphy and the Doha Round. I was there. You know that agriculture is also a major issue with supply management and the opening of markets. Those are threats for farmers. Farmers aren't getting any richer. They have a very difficult life and those things threaten their quality of life.
I have a question. I saw recently some statistics indicating that those agreements -- the bilateral agreements and WTO agreements -- create situations where some people are getting richer but many more are only getting poorer. There's a saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That's part of the negotiations.
Does your trade policy include strategies or methods both to open our markets -- I know that we live in an era of open markets -- and to provide better protection to our manufacturing industries, our people and our regions? We should have an approach taking account of our whole territory, the whole of Québec and of Canada, because we should not give up on some regions or some groups of population. Would I be dreaming in thinking that those agreements could make sure that everybody has a place in our society and that nobody gets poorer, white taking account of Asian competition? This kind of competition creates difficulties for our industries in forcing them to produce at the least possible cost.
I would like to have you answer about this. Are there any possible strategies? Would it be possible to provide some type of protection to our weakened industries?