Mr. Speaker, I will just pick up from where I left off.
I happen to be rising pursuant to a question I asked the Minister for International Trade about the multilateral agreement on investment, which has everything to do with what the hon. member for Malpeque was just talking about, that is, restricting the power of government even further than the power of national governments have already been restricted by the various free trade agreements which the government has already entered into.
The other day I asked the Minister for International Trade a question about when and how and if the government was going to permit the public to have some say in what the government's stance would be in the negotiations with respect to the multilateral agreement on investment. These negotiations have been ongoing for two years in Paris, in the context of the OECD. They started in April 1995. They were actually scheduled to end in April 1997.
If the Liberals had had their way we would have had a negotiated agreement—done, finished, fait accompli—by April 1997 and they would never have even let us know it was happening.
We could not have relied on the official opposition or even the third party in the last Parliament to have raised such matters because they all bow down to the same altar of the multinational corporations and the global economic order that was created for the benefit of investors, and to hell with the workers and everybody else.
We finally have a Parliament in which these kinds of issues can and will be raised.
I want to hear from the government how it intends to involve the Canadian public. What will the government's stance be at the multilateral agreement on investment negotiations?
We know from the draft, as it stands, that the MAI intends to drastically reduce the power of governments to intervene in the economy on behalf of the common good, the public interest, regional development, research and development and all the other ways in which governments have sought to act in the interests of the Canadian people.
The government has the ability to seek certain exemptions in respect of social, educational, health, cultural and other areas of concern, such as government procurement, et cetera.
We need to know what the government is going to do very quickly because the negotiations are scheduled to end in April of 1998. If the Canadian public is to be meaningfully involved, there needs to be a process now. We do not want to be looking at an agreement which has already been negotiated, where the government has put the Canadian public in a take-it-or-leave-it position. We want to be able to say now to the government, in various public ways, what it is it should be insisting on in those negotiations.
If the government continues to insist on being at those negotiations, at the very least it should be doing what the Canadian people insist it be doing, and that is making sure that our ability as a people and our ability as a government to act in our own interests is protected by the various exemptions which the government should be seeking in the MAI negotiations.
I look forward to hearing from the parliamentary secretary exactly what the government's position on this will be. What exemptions is the government seeking?
What are the deal breakers? What are the things that they absolutely have to have or there will be no deal in Paris?
I see you rising, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps I have already exceeded my time. I hope not because I have the greatest respect for the time limits put on me. I will sit down and look forward to what the government member has to say.