Thank you. I want to congratulate you and put on the record that I think you people have delivered a good agreement that will help not only Canadian families but certainly Canadian industries.
A lot of times we forget that it is Canadian industries that actually employ Canadians, and that when those industries do well our citizens do well. I need to point out, because my good friend over at the NDP wants to always talk about the loss of manufacturing jobs—which we understand, but we also need to look at the fact that we've created, under this government, just in February alone, 43,000 new jobs, in the last year 361,000, and almost 800,000 new jobs since we became government—that I'm sure this agreement will go a long way to continuing that great growth.
The other thing I want point out to my friend in the NDP is that in February we were up almost 5%, and that is in terms of wage growth. I know the argument is always that we're losing manufacturing jobs and just creating low-paying jobs when we deal with trade agreements, etc. I'm not sure exactly how we could continue to see our hourly growth go up if we're losing all those high-paying jobs.
This is just a comment for the sake of the record, if we could add it.
I want to read some comments that have been made in the House. One member stated, “It is the same thing with the EFTA sellout where Liechtenstein outmanoeuvred, outnegotiated and outclassed this inept and incompetent government.” I take a bit of exception to that in terms of—