Mr. Speaker, it is an historic occasion to enter this debate because it does mark the end of half a century of specialized experience in world trade, what we would think to be flawed experience, and the moving into the 21st century.
I am reminded of the vision of the great wartime leader President Franklin Roosevelt whose plans for the post war period included not merely a United Nations organization but a parallel international trade organization that would promote principles of liberalism, free trade and that would remove trade tariff barriers around the world.
President Roosevelt did not live to see his vision implemented or to see it fail. The reasons for the failure are a matter for historians. Some wrongly blame it on the cold war but we would have to say it was the persistence of protectionist feelings in the United States associated with that tragically ill-advised attempt retroactively to cure the world depression, the Smoot-Hawley high tariff wall approach.
Mr. Roosevelt and his heirs, Mr. Truman and others, had to fight against that. They also had to fight against the neo-isolationist American thinking that one found bound up with the Bricker amendment controversy seeking to limit an affirmative American role in western Europe's political and economic recovery.
The failure of the International Trade Organization, the failure of the high hopes of Bretton Woods toward the end of the war led to the creation of this strange institution. Some have said, borrowing from Guys and Dolls : ``The oldest permanent floating crap game in the world,'' but in fact it is a periodic, recurring international diplomatic conference, GATT.
GATT had many things to offer in terms of history, but if one looks back on it it was a concentration of particular problem solving operations, each bringing in its own set of specialists, each producing an arcane set of diplomatic negotiations that were never open to larger public debate.
GATT had a function to fulfil but the quest for overarching principles or an overarching vision of a world economy was simply not there. This is the significance of the revival half a century later of the concept of a World Trade Organization. It will finally balance in the economic sense what the United Nations is intended to do in a governmental sense.
With the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, it completes a triad of international economic organizations. That is all to the good and we might say that it is about time. It is a federalizing process. It is a constitutional process. It will mean that the large issues of world trade are no longer debated in secret in those holiday resorts visited off season because that is really where the GATT conferences were held.
They got cut rate rates. One visits Uruguay in winter instead of the beach in summer. GATT had its function but it did not really answer up to the problems of the emerging 21st century. This WTO initiative comes with a period when the walls are falling down all around the world, all the walls. The Berlin wall falls politically. You cannot shut out the economic ideas when you open the way to political ideas.
It has been said, and it is true, that you can achieve a market economy without having a liberal democratic society but you cannot maintain the one without the other. The English historical experience was that certainly free trade principles emerged before the political liberalization but the political liberalization marches hand in hand with that.
In very many respects this is an historic occasion for us. The debate has been constructive and helpful. I noted in particular the interventions of my colleagues, my friends of the Bloc with their concerns about federalism. I can assure them that on this side of the House we share the desire for a more flexible, co-operative federalism in which there is, not merely as a matter of political common sense but also of a genuine sense of goodwill, co-operation and liaison between the federal government and provincial authorities. So much of the achievement of
free trade depends on the working co-operation at all levels of government.
Those interventions have been helpful and have been taken note of. You may be assured that in the implementation of the government's structural reform programs they will be operated on so that we move from a period in which Canadian economic policy has been governed by bilateralism plus multilateralism through this periodic international diplomatic conference that is called GATT into what has been called a mondialist, one world type of conception, a parliamentary constitutional organization where the debates are open, where the delegates can make thrust and counter thrust but where everything is into the open. That I think accords with the spirit of our times.
It is not a closed organization, although it is important to stress-and I think we have borne this in mind-that you cannot in our debate on an act to implement the World Trade Organization and in the guise of making amendments to national legislation insert unilateral reservations to an international treaty. If we are to be in at the beginning as a charter member of the World Trade Organization, we must do so without reservations and with the full confidence of our ability to make the system work.
We have disengaged more easily and more elegantly than some other countries, certainly more easily than our neighbour, the United States, from the old order. The swords are being turned into ploughshares. Economic forces guide the next century. The old order on which the cold war was based is over. As a charter member of the World Trade Organization we are in a position to make very concrete suggestions on the accession of new members. We can help the entry of China into this organization. We can look at the special case of Taiwan because I do not think Taiwan can be ignored. We can look at a place for Russia with its new liberalizing phase still to be completed.
There is an enormous challenge in this transition from a cold war, politically and militarily based world order to one based on free trade and the free commerce in intellectual ideas that goes with this.
This is something of a challenge to Canada because we have led in foreign policy in so many areas. We invented peacekeeping. In very many senses if you look at the substantive principles of the United Nations they are our ideas for a democratizing of a world organization that perhaps too easily fell into the concept of a permanent members' club. We are in the fight there.
This is the challenge of the new bill and in some sense the happiness that we find such a consensus around the House from virtually all the members of the House in support of this principle and this idea.
In moving the new system into the 21st century there is no derogation from our special relations with the United States and Mexico under NAFTA. These agreements subsist but they are seen in the larger context of one world with its own principles in which a pluralism of decision making occurs. This has been the Canadian way from the beginning. I return to my original point. It is a moment in history. Half a century, in a certain sense, of the carryover of the old, pre-World War II economic order comes to an end with new hopes and new visions. It is a privilege to have been part of it.