Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just have a couple of points.
I appreciate, Ms. Buck, your intervention that Canada does exist in a global economy, that we actually do make things with other countries and that other countries make things with us. I'm sure that's news for some of my colleagues. But seriously, to me this is not a colossal waste of time; to me this is an opportunity. It may be simply because I'm an optimist and not a pessimist. It's not anything about being part of government. It's about a fledgling group—I think the word you used, Ms. Buck, was “embryonic”—that makes up the ninth largest economy in the world. Together we have an opportunity to look at this for very little cost. We're in at the ground floor. The very idea that somehow we wouldn't pursue this, I can't grasp the logic of. I challenge the opposition members to produce logic saying that we shouldn't look at this trading block, because there is no great cost and there's not liable to be for some period of time.
I brought up the comparison with the European Union early on for a reason. Sixty years ago they were shooting at one another in the European Union. The new member states from the Eastern bloc countries suffered under communist and socialist dictatorships. The newest country has only emerged in the last decade from a civil war and an occupation of its territory by neighbouring countries. The world's not a perfect spot. Either we're going to trade together and we're going to live together, and we're going to figure out that there's a benefit for all of us in that, or we'll become this little isolationist country that goes back to the previous government's record of free trade agreements, when yes, the economy was good and we were trading with the United States, with close $2 billion worth of trade going across the border every day and the dollar was inflated at a buck forty. A whole bunch of negative things happened from that as well.
But my point is simple. You folks are trade people. Here's an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. This can go sideways, it can go nowhere, or it can go up. Why would we not want to participate?