Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the minister to his new portfolio. As he said during his speech, trade is a very important area for Canada. He noted that barriers to trade are coming down worldwide and that Canada is very dependent upon trade. I would agree with him.
I welcome the Liberal caucus to the area of free trade. One by one, the Liberals are slowly becoming believers. It was not always the case. In some cases they are actually born again free traders. I welcome that conversion, albeit a little bit late.
I am concerned with the government's approach in a few areas and would like to ask the minister some questions on that. I am concerned about its approach to adopting new trade regimes around the world such as a new trade deal with Chile.
We are now talking about one with Mercosur, which I welcome, but we have not done the homework to make it possible for our businesses to take advantage. We have the worst record in the G-7 countries of trade barriers within our own country. As a matter of fact, we have more barriers to trade in Canada than there are in the entire European Union. That is simply not acceptable.
When the minister talks about barriers coming down, I suggest the next time team Canada is out on a mission perhaps it should take a team Canada mission right here at home to dismantle trade barriers that are making it very difficult for our businesses to take advantage of our trade deals.
In fact a private member's bill was introduced this morning by my colleague from Lakeland talking about just that. I would hope the Liberals on the other side would support that private member's bill and maybe even lift it up and adopt it as their own to get rid of the trade barriers that are limiting us.
I am also concerned that the government is not using the processes the minister talked about to settle disputes. We have a very good dispute settling mechanism within NAFTA and now within the World Trade Organization. What happened when it came time to use them on durum wheat a couple of years ago, softwood lumber and Helms-Burton? They never used the processes that were put in place.
I challenge the minister to tell me why and what they will do about that instead of accepting export caps and accepting intimidation from the United States. I want to know why we are not using the processes that have been put in place.
I want to know what the government is doing to bring down internal trade barriers in this country. At our committee on small and medium size enterprises we heard businesses state that they had actually moved from Ontario into Michigan because they could do better trade with the provinces in Canada that way than they could from Ontario. That is simply unacceptable.
What will they do to correct this problem? What will they do about using the processes we have in place to settle disputes?