Mr. Speaker, the Reform Party will be supporting these five amendments which are of a technical nature to bolster Bill C-54, commonly known as the blocking legislation for Helms-Burton.
It is clear that the United States has a dispute with Cuba that needs to be resolved. However, it is a dispute that should not be taken outside of the United States.
The question here is whether the United States has the ability or the right to apply its law outside of its country. I submit it clearly does not. It is in contravention of NAFTA and Canada should have moved this dispute to a NAFTA panel long ago.
My colleague from the Bloc has said that Canada has been sitting on this problem since July, and I support that view. We have fought long and hard to have a dispute mechanism set up to settle these kinds of problems both at NAFTA and at GATT. We now have the World Trade Organization, and Canada seems to be afraid to take these matters to final resolution at these international bodies.
What is the use of having negotiated agreements through a long period of time to settle problems of this nature if we never use them?
The parliamentary secretary pointed out that this was an election year in the United States and sometimes during an election year things get a little strange down there in terms of foreign of policy. I support that view, but I do submit that the democratic president of the United States did sign the Helms-Burton bill. This is not a bill that just came out of the Republicans. The president did give a bit of an exemption to Canada for a period of time, but the meter is still ticking.
The Canadian companies involved still have liabilities accruing and I believe that C-54 does not address a couple of issues. It does not address the issue of liabilities that are continuing to accrue. It does not address the issue of blocking Canadian executives and their families of companies that are affected from entering the United States. Therefore I see Bill C-54 as a half measure, one that needs to be taken, but we should have taken this to a dispute panel at NAFTA long ago.
I believe there is a disturbing trend coming out of this Liberal government. We saw it back in 1994 when we had a dispute with the United States over durum wheat where Canada accepted export caps. Is that in the spirit of free trade? I submit it is not.
Clearly Canada and the United States agreed under the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement that there should be no restriction on trade between the two countries, there should be a phase down of tariffs and that the whole idea was to try to establish a market economy based on the ability of producers to have some regional advantage possibly.
However, what we have is a government that seems to be willing to cave in to the United States every time we have a dispute. This is just one more example of it. We saw it in the Canada-U.S. wheat dispute in 1994. We saw it again in the softwood lumber dispute where Canada has decided to impose restrictive quotas on ourselves which is very cumbersome to put in place and to administer. In fact, the whole process has been delayed another month because they cannot agree on how provincial allocations should be set out and we have not even arrived at the allocations that go to individual companies yet.
Now we have a dispute over a situation in which the United States is trying to apply its law outside of its own country which is clearly in contravention of a NAFTA deal that we have signed, and this government continues to use a process of stalling. If we had taken this issue to a NAFTA panel it probably would have been resolved by now. I believe the panel would have found in favour of Canada.
We support the amendments which strengthen Bill C-54. They are of a technical nature. The bill will be of some help to Canadian companies but clearly this dispute should be resolved on the basis of the international agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico.
We will be supporting this bill, but this government must start to show some backbone in responding to the United States. With regard to trade policy the United States tends to act like a bit of a bully. If we do not respond with corresponding strength I do not think the Americans will respect us. We must show them we have some strength and are willing to stand up to them in this type of dispute.
Therefore we will be supporting these amendments at report stage, but we must move far beyond this, show some strength and challenge countries like the United States when they try to apply their laws outside their own countries.