When Canada signs a foreign trade agreement, what we're essentially doing is we're giving foreign companies and competitors for Canadian companies rights in the Canadian marketplace. We're saying to them, “You can come to Canada and be treated like a Canadian company. You can have access to the same benefits that Canadian taxpayers are providing Canadian companies.” If they come in and end up in the retail sector destroying Canadian small businesses and small towns because it's a Costco or a Walmart or something, well, we're paying for that through those trade agreements where we've given those rights away. We haven't provided to our Canadian companies the kind of support they need to be able to compete in their own market.
I watched Jean Chrétien do these Captain Canada tours around the world. What he was really doing was he was attempting to create Canadian economic activity outside of Canada, exporting Canadian capital and exporting potentially Canadian jobs into other countries. That's what those countries are doing when we sign foreign trade agreements with them: they're looking for investment rights in Canada; they're looking to have their intellectual property rights protected; they're looking to have privileged access to the Canadian market. When we signed a bilateral agreement with the U.S., they wanted better access to our market than the Europeans got or the Japanese got.
This is a very dangerous game when you have a population of 30 million.
It's not a game that you can win.