Mr. Chairman, certainly we won't be supporting the motion for a multitude of reasons. The first reason, of course, is that this is a variation of the motion that was already passed at committee in 2007, as a number of members have already said.
We should go back into what happened. Although I wasn't at committee in 2007, my understanding of what happened is certainly quite different from Mr. Julian's understanding, which doesn't particularly surprise me.
Because the debate at the time was around the security and prosperity partnership and it somehow got away from that and into a discussion about bulk water, the government didn't support the motion. That has nothing to do with our position on bulk water. Our position on bulk water has been very clear, going back to May 1, 2007 and former Minister David Emerson's statement, “It is already Canadian law and it is built into the NAFTA that water in its natural state is not covered by the NAFTA, full stop.... It is not covered.”
You can only say it so many ways and so many times. Repetition doesn't make it any different, quite frankly.
You know the committee is dealing with the report. I agree totally with Ms. Hall Findlay. Let's deal with the report. If, after the report is dealt with, Mr. Julian still wants to put forward his motion, then it could be dealt with at that time.
Further to that, let's separate fact from fiction here. Let's separate the proverbial apples and oranges. This is one interpretation, Mr. Julian's interpretation, of what NAFTA does. I don't think anyone else agrees with the interpretation that water is somehow a commodity, that it's tradeable in its natural state, that it's not covered under NAFTA. As a matter of fact, I'd go further and say that it is already protected. It's interpretation.
It's redundant because it has already been dealt with. Quite frankly, we did not hear--at least I didn't hear--the same explanation from the witnesses that Mr. Julian seems to have heard. There were a number of witnesses who stated that NAFTA creates no rights to the natural water resources of any party to the agreement. Nothing in NAFTA would oblige any NAFTA party either to exploit its water for commercial use, or to begin exporting its water in any form. You can't take that and change it into something else. This is not alchemy. You can't take someone's spoken words and say, “No, that's what that person meant”.
I know there were people who appeared as witnesses who have a different opinion, the Council of Canadians and others, or I should say representatives of the Council of Canadians, because I lump them all into the same group, which is not fair, Mr. Chair. But the reality is that it has already been dealt with. It's already covered.
I don't think there's any disagreement among parties that we expect that water resources in Canada are Canadian, that we expect boundary waters and bulk water are not tradeable items. However, we all recognize that there is water going back and forth every day at the border between Canada and the United States. It flows in both directions. There are also towns on the Canadian side of the border that supply sister towns or brother towns on the American side of the border with water, and there is nothing wrong with that.
It's not as simple as saying that we just disagree with this motion. I disagree with this motion because the motion is fundamentally wrong.