Mr. Speaker, as we celebrate with South Africans the birth of a new democratic South Africa, Canadians are proud of the role we played in maintaining economic sanctions against the old South Africa.
That pride is called into question by some of the things that have been said recently by the Prime Minister and the Minister for International Trade in which the linking of trade to human and political rights has been seriously downplayed.
At the Marrakesh meeting to sign the new GATT agreement, which brought the World Trade Organization into existence, the minister was quoted in the Financial Post of April 9 as saying that he was reluctant to follow the American proposal for an international labour code.
Without such a code, the world's multinationals will be allowed to prey even on the child labourers of the developing world and the process of globalization will certainly continue on its present race to the bottom.
I call on the Minister for International Trade to overcome his conservative inhibitions, to see labour as a trade issue and to take the lead in designing an effective social and labour code under the World Trade Organization.
Globalization without global community and global standards is nothing other than moral anarchy.