Yes, thank you.
I just want to respond to the parliamentary secretary's comments. It is wrong to say that, because there were consultations on CETA, there have been consultations on this agreement. I think the process here was a train wreck, and it's really important to note that, if we don't end up with a successor agreement, this is not a transitional or temporary agreement. This is a permanent agreement. What kind of process was this, to have a permanent trade agreement with the United Kingdom, frankly?
Therefore, no, in terms of the consultations on CETA, which I maintain and the New Democratic Party maintains was a bad deal anyway, and we've heard testimony even in the hearings on this bill that there are serious problems with CETA, those consultations don't count for this agreement because this is about a permanent agreement with another country. This is only not permanent if we replace it.
The government has said that there are three things that are going to get the U.K. back to the table. One is a good faith commitment to a new agreement, which in no way means that we will conclude a successor agreement. Canada has had intentions to sign agreements with other countries that we haven't in fact signed agreements with. One is around rules of origin. There may be some substance to that. The other one is around cheese. They say, the U.K. will want to come back to the table and get a new agreement because the cheese TRQs under the WTO are going to expire, except that they also say that they're not going to make any concessions on cheese. Therefore, why would the U.K. be incentivized to come back to the table on the issue of cheese, if the Canadian government has no intention of making concessions on cheese?
Which is it? Are they prepared to create further access to the Canadian cheese market under a future agreement, in which case I could see the U.K. wanting to come back to the table for that, or are they not, in which case that's not a leverage point to come back?
One of the things we can do is sunset this legislation so that this is something that has to come back before Parliament, so that there's internal pressure on our government to make sure that we get back to the table, and so that we don't end up, by inertia, having created a permanent and long-lasting trade deal with the United Kingdom today, by passing this legislation, that doesn't ever get to the stuff that the government continues to say is going to come up in a successor deal, which we have no guarantee will actually be negotiated, never mind concluded.
I just find this whole idea of a transitional agreement, frankly, preposterous. I've said it many times, but the more the government brings it up, the more irritating I find it, because as this whole process has gone on, what we found is that in fact we're signing a permanent agreement. Nobody signed up for that. Nobody was consulted about that. The government didn't even let on that was what was going on until they had already signed the deal. It's preposterous.
Let's stop pretending that somehow we have this temporary transitional agreement. It's a permanent agreement until another one is concluded, and there's no guarantee of that happening. Parliamentarians should be doing what they can to ensure that we get back to the table in a meaningful process that issues something other than CETA, which has not been great for Canada.
We've heard in many different sectors how our trade deficit has increased as result of CETA and that Canadian producers and Canadian manufacturers continue to struggle to get entry into markets that they might have access to on paper, but they don't actually have any real access to.