Thank you.
I know we had a colourful exchange with some of the honourable members from this side, and I don't want to leave this room with the sense that we are so ideologically at odds that we can't see the common ground.
Let me put it to you very simply. We're dealing with a country here that has had some very difficult internal problems. The Colombia of 10 or 15 years ago, the Colombia that I first came to know, was a country where you dared not walk outside for fear of being kidnapped, so what we are seeing is improvement. The only argument I'm making is that there is plenty of right and plenty of wrong, left and right. I happen to be a believer that part of the fundamental problem we're trying to deal with in the whole of Latin America is that it's a continent that's been riven by class divisions, where the poor have been exploited. There is a long, unhappy, unpleasant history of dictators working hand-in-hand with monopolists and crony capitalism. I'm aware of all of that. What I'm interested in is seeing progress, the kind of progress we have seen in little countries like Costa Rica that signed a free trade agreement with Canada, a country like Chile, where the presidential palace was being bombed and the president assassinated. Look at Chile today. It's where we can see progress.
We see real progress in Colombia today, but the central driving force of that progress has to be democratization, the opening up of the economy, accountability, rule of law, through which you will have protection of human rights. And the enterprise system, especially those from our own country and those who carry with them, I think, the highest possible values, can be seen as only a powerful force to aid and abet those causes.
Now is not the time to say, “Look, trade unionists in a small minority, tragic as it is, are being assassinated, but you know, general Colombians are being assassinated in much greater numbers than that. We don't want to have anything to do with you. It's too dangerous to be here.” It's not the right thing to do. If we took that attitude, then we'd say why go to China? Why go to some countries that today rank quite highly in the OECD but whose rule of law, values, murder rates, lack of accountability are still problematic? The name of the game is to engage people and to bring the rule of law, to bring openness and transparency to them. That's what I see this great initiative with Colombia is about.
To me, the few additional--I say few, but it's relatively few in relation to the bigger accomplishments--financial benefits that will come to Canadian companies, the thousand that are there now and the more that will come, against what Colombia can be five years or ten years from now, if Colombia can aspire to be a new Chile, I think is remarkable. If we can make a contribution to that, terrific. And a free trade agreement between Canada and Colombia will signal that Canada is not a fair-weather friend. We want to help. That is why this government has committed itself, not only to a free trade agreement but to promoting capacity building, building governance, social responsibility.
All I can tell you is that for any Canadian company of any size that is operating in Colombia, the people who are running those organizations would say the same thing I am saying to you. They don't want to be in a country that is riven by murder, by rape, by kidnapping. They want to be in a country that works. The best way to do that is to bring the rule of law to the country, and a free trade agreement will help to do that.