Madam Speaker, I do not know what to say to that other than that is absolute rubbish.
If the government really is as brave as the member suggests, why is it putting up huge protection barriers around the magazine publishing industry in Canada? He just said we were cowering. It is his government that is putting up the barriers. It is going to impose huge fines on Sports Illustrated or whatever because the government would dare to allow Canadian advertisers in advertise in those magazines.
It is ridiculous. The member argues on the one hand that the government is going to protect Canadians. On the other hand it is denying Canadian advertisers a vehicle by which to promote their goods and services. He cannot have it both ways. We want these people to make money too. We do not make money by giving them a subsidy and protecting them from competition. That is how we kill industry. My friend should know that.
We had protectionism in this country for years. As an example, we had textile producers in southern Quebec. What happened to them? Ultimately they could not compete when the barriers came down. We need to get rid of those protectionist walls. We want Canadian cultural industries to make money.
I encourage the government to take some of its own advice and allow them to make money by allowing free competition so they can export around the world. What we want is to see lower taxes so they can compete. We want to see those people succeed like they have already done in other areas of Canadian culture where there is no protectionism.
I point out to my friend that we have many great Canadian novelists. They send their products far afield. They do extraordinarily well. We do not have protectionism for them. When they produce a novel they sell it around the world and those novels come back here. That is not what the government is proposing for the magazine industry. It wants to create a problem not only for the magazine industry by allowing it to atrophy because it does not have competition but ultimately it will cause all kinds of problems for the rest of the country by creating a trade war with our biggest trading partner. It is ridiculous that the government would do that.