Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, let me draw to the committee's attention a piece of news that I find amazing. It is that earlier this week a deal was reached in the United States Congress to approve four pending free trade agreements that are negotiated with changes—Peru, Panama, and so forth.
The political atmosphere in Washington, as we know, is poisonous. We have a Democrat-controlled Congress. We have a Republican White House with an incumbent who is desperately unpopular, and we are in the middle of presidential politics. We have all the conditions for gridlock, and they reached a deal to approve four of these agreements.
We have two agreements pending, one with four countries of Central America and the other with the countries of EFTA. They have been around for the last four years and they aren't moving. Indeed, the blockage occurred during the days of our previous majority government. These blockages began to appear in 2002-03, when there wasn't the type of political atmosphere that necessarily might apply in the situations we have now, yet there was no movement.
Why was there no movement? It was because very powerful—if small—lobbies, one in the area of textiles and the other in the area of shipbuilding, have blocked this. In my experience, governments and parliaments know how to deal with opposition; what they have difficulty dealing with is the absence of support.
When the government of the day—the successor government of Mr. Martin and the current government—looked to see who would support the government if they took these decisions to say no to the textile industry and no to the shipbuilding and they were not going to protect them, nobody supported them. And they don't support them because the kinds of things that we are able to negotiate in these free trade agreements are of very little positive interest to the business community, to the people who would benefit.
When we negotiated the free trade agreement, we had massive support from the business community and some isolated opposition in corners of the business community. Why? It was because they could see their interest, and we could see what their economic response to it is.
Now, when we have a trade policy that's focused on maximizing export access with a range of countries when our principal interests continue to lie with the United States, you cannot look to the business community to come before the committee and say not to listen to the textile industry or to the shipbuilding industry because they have larger national interests of the type my colleague Mr. Grenier spoke about. The reason for that is that the trade agenda no longer matches the economic interests of the country. It therefore no longer draws those people who are prepared to come before this committee, to go before ministers, or to write letters to Mr. Julian and say they want this agreement and they're prepared to invest political coinage in doing it.
It's not a machinery of government problem; it's an agenda problem, an agenda that is not matching the interests of the country. A machinery of government response, in my opinion, will not provide the route out.
Thank you.