Madam Speaker, the hon. member welcomed suggestions on his concept of a Canadian trading organization. I am wondering whether he is familiar with a parliamentary task force that submitted a report over 12 years ago now. It was not called a Canadian trading organization. It was called a national trading corporation.
This all-party task force which travelled across Canada and actually through Europe, looked at trading houses, looked at bartering, et cetera. The whole idea was that if we could help small and medium sized businesses increase their exports by 10 per cent and if we could get some firms that were not exporting into the export business, we could generate $10 billion worth of additional trade. That was back then; it would be more like $100 billion now.
The concept was that this national trading corporation would be funded 50 per cent by government and 50 per cent by the private sector. As we know, many countries today will not trade with another unless there is some government involvement and that was the idea of the 50-50 per cent.
Unfortunately on the day when the special parliamentary task force tabled its report the Conservatives at the time submitted a minority report and shot down the main report. They agreed with the recommendations. Actually, many of the recommendations came from the Conservatives. Unfortunately on the day that the report was tabled it was not supported.
I recommend it to the hon. member. I believe there will be a copy of the report in the parliamentary library. I know it would be of great interest to him because I think that is the kind of foreign affairs, independent Canadian foreign policy, that we should be looking at.
I really appreciated his creative suggestions. It is too bad that he was not here 12 years ago.