Obviously I cannot know. I just do not think that is one contest we need to get into. This debate has been most enlightening today because we have an interesting separation.
We are talking about whether or not Canada should sign into the World Trade Organization. The actual title of this bill is the World Trade Organization Agreement Implementation Act. It is at the second reading stage. We support this bill.
There is a truism about being competitive: If you do not compete, you cannot be competitive. Therefore we have to have within our psyche the desire to compete and to be competitive. That is the dichotomy which has come in this debate thus far today. There are members of the Bloc who are by and large supportive of the notion of free trade and expanded trade, but with a severe reservation because of its impact on supply management.
It is fair to say that as a result of the implementation of the GATT agreement supply management will have seen the last of its days in Canada. Let there be no mistake: Supply management is price fixing. If it was supply management of photo finishing, it would be called price fixing. If it was supply management of shoe manufacturing, it would be called price fixing.
Supply management creates a situation whereby a limited number of producers have access to the market exclusive of anyone else. They are thereby provided a guaranteed return on their investment. What happens of course as a result of that is that everybody else who makes a living based on that investment also has a guaranteed return on their investment, the feed suppliers, the implement suppliers, everyone down the line. You know who gets it in the neck? Mr. and Mrs. Joe Consumer in the land.
If we want a situation where we are going to have industries which are non-competitive, where we are going to have winners and losers in society picked not by the marketplace but by the government, then supply management is a textbook illustration on how to do it. Therefore, one of the main beneficial and most important things that will come as a result of signing this agreement will be the ordered timely end of supply management.
This whole exercise as many people know started in 1944. It was called the Bretton Woods agreement. It was determined that at the conclusion of the second world war it might not be a bad idea if the nations of the world figured out some sort of an arrangement whereby they could learn to trade with each other under certain rules and conditions that might help to prevent future wars. That was essentially the reason behind the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agreement.
Three major decisions were reached at Bretton Woods in 1944. They were the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Trade Organization.
The International Trade Organization did not really get off the ground but the successor, which is the GATT, did. To most people GATT is an obscure term. It stands for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It really has a tremendous impact on the lives of all Canadians daily. It is not just an obscure international agreement that we are signing. It is an agreement that will fundamentally change the way we function as a nation.
As Canada goes forward into the next century it is perhaps a very timely agreement for us to be signing.
We should compare our nation today with our nation when we got involved in the free trade agreement. Going back to the time when we got into free trade with the United States it was a major leap of faith for most Canadians. It said we were going to start to break down the trade barriers within Canada and start competing on our own as a nation within the world.
First we had to compete with the United States. Then we went to the North American free trade agreement in which we decided we were going to compete with the United States and Mexico. Now we are going one step further with the GATT which means we will be competing sooner or later with everyone in the world.
What does that mean to us here in Canada? How does it affect us when we are trying to get by, trying to get a job, trying just to pay our rent? This is it. If we are not the very best that we can be, if we do not as a nation and as individuals strive for excellence, we are going to be buried in the world. We can no longer hide behind tariff barriers.
The tariff barriers in Canada existed for years and years. They created artificial subsidies. The unnatural but natural conclusion were things like the back-in agreements or the backflow where empty grain cars go to Thunder Bay and then come back so that the railways can get a subsidy, so they can get more money for some God forsaken government program. We have the situation where grain grown in western Canada is subsidized to be shipped east. It goes into a feedlot in central Canada so that we can sell beef raised in central Canada on western grain rather than having the beef fattened on western grain in western Canada and then sending dressed beef to the markets, a natural advantage.
All of these distortions that are built into our trade agreements within our own country serve one purpose only: to make us less competitive on the world stage. That is why it is so important that we as Canadians in the present supply managed sectors and all other sectors understand the absolute necessity of becoming competitive as world traders.
A quarter of our nation's wealth is derived from international trade. Eighty per cent of our international trade is with the United States. Twenty-five per cent of that trade is internal trade within branch plants.
In last Saturday's Globe and Mail there was a business report from the Royal Bank. I will just show it very briefly for those in television land-