Mr. Speaker, the NDP supports the motion that has been brought forward by the Bloc Quebecois. We welcome the attention that is being paid to the issue of globalization and give credit to the member for Lac-Saint-Jean for provoking this debate. However, contrary to what the member said when he was on his feet, the debate is not just starting but has been going on for some time. I would suggest that it has been going on since about 1987 in the lead-up to the free trade agreement between Canada and the United States.
I am quite happy to hear what the member has to say. I agree with him that there is a new consciousness among young people, among those of his own generation, about the extent to which forces are being gathered together within this globalization model. They are very much leading to a future that not many young people want to contemplate.
It is a future that has within it a low wage economy for a great many young Canadians. I have seen it in my own work on the MAI over the past several months going across the country and speaking on campuses and in other places. I have spoken to students about the multilateral agreement on investment and how it is the latest stage in a globalization model that the NDP rejects and that I want young people to reject. There is a new awareness on the part of young people at the university level and elsewhere about how wary they should be of this globalization model.
The member for Lac-Saint-Jean said that he hoped time would see him right on this motion even if everybody did not agree with him at the moment. Without malice I say that I have felt this way for a while. I remember making a similar speech in 1987 when I said that time would see us right on the downside of free trade.
I think we are reaching one of those times—and I am not speaking of the member now—when people who otherwise were very supportive of this model as it emerged in the context of the FTA, the NAFTA and the WTO are now beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this particular model.
These second thoughts are not just coming from the left, where people had not second thoughts but first thoughts about the downsides of globalization, they are coming from people on the right and in the centre who are asking themselves whether the effects of an unfettered global marketplace are not more than they bargained for when they first began to promote this model of globalization.
I am very happy to see the motion here today. I noticed that it begins by referring to a motion passed in this House in 1989. That motion was moved by my former leader, the member from Oshawa, Ed Broadbent, at the time of his departure from this House.
I think the fact that this motion is referred to at the beginning of the Bloc motion points out something that many people are aware of, that is, that there has been a certain affinity between the NDP, and before that the CCF, and the social democratic tradition in Quebec which is represented by the Bloc Quebecois, which in the past was represented not just exclusively by the Bloc Quebecois from Quebec but by Quebeckers in general.
It is fair to say that Quebec has had a tremendous impact on the kind of country Canada has become over the years. A large part of our social democratic nature has come from Quebec. In English-speaking Canada it has come largely from the tradition that the NDP represents.
Those two things acting together, often synthesized by a Liberal government at the federal level, have led to the kind of country which is now being dismantled by the very globalization model the member for Lac-Saint-Jean refers to, which we in the NDP have been criticizing for some time.
This debate gives me an opportunity, as the NDP House leader and also as the trade critic, to reflect on the relationship between the NDP and Quebec nationalists, not only nationalists in the Bloc Quebecois but also nationalists outside the Bloc Quebecois who are not necessarily sovereignists or separatists. There was always thought to be a great deal of affinity in so far as we held these social democratic values in common.
What has happened over the last several years, particularly since the creation of the Bloc, but going back to the beginning of the debate on the free trade agreement, is that we have disagreed with the Bloc Quebecois, and not just about separation, obviously. We are federalists and they are sovereignists. They understand that. We understand it. It is fair ball.
However, where we have had problems and why I welcome this motion as an opportunity for all of us to reflect, is the way in which we have seen the free trade agreement, the NAFTA, the WTO and now the MAI as models for globalization that work against social democracy, that work against the ability of governments to create, to preserve and to maintain social democratic values.
We have always found it odd, frustrating and even irritating on occasion to see Quebeckers of various political persuasions embracing free trade and the NAFTA. I say this in all earnestness. I am not trying to provoke a partisan debate, I am trying to extend an opportunity for all of us to reflect on this. Recently, they did not even bother to file a minority report on the MAI.
In the last little while there seems to have been a bit of a shift, within the ranks of the Bloc in particular, and I welcome this shift.
I think from our point of view this particular model of globalization, which the FTA, the NAFTA, the WTO and the MAI represent, is not just something that we should be sceptical about as social democrats from the point of view of whether it creates justice, because we certainly should be sceptical of it on those grounds. It has led to increasing poverty and increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, not just within countries, but between countries in many respects in terms of north, south and so on.
We also should be sceptical of it in so far as it is a threat to the sovereignty of governments; to the power of governments to intervene, to shape, to contain, to regulate, to do all of the things that we have been able to do in the economy over the years to create a more social democratic Canada, which Bloc members would want to have at their disposal if there was an independent Quebec and they wanted to shape the Quebec economy.
I hope this debate might be an opportunity to hear back from Bloc members on this. It has always been a bit of a puzzle to us why they embrace that particular view of the global economy and why at one point the former leader of the Bloc, now the premier of Quebec, talked about the end of ideology, that ideology had been replaced by trade. That was on March 15, 1994 in this House.
Trade in itself is an ideology, in particular liberalized trade without government regulation, without core labour standards. This is in itself an ideology and there is ideology to be debated within different models of how global trade will unfold.
To pretend somehow that there is no ideological debate here is to play the game that the government wants us to play, but not so much the Reform. I think they acknowledge that there is an ideological debate here and they are very clear about what side they are on.
I welcome this motion from the Bloc. I look forward to hearing more of what they have to say and reading more about how they square what they are saying today with some of the things that have been said in the past. I look forward to working together with them and with others who see the real threat that this model of globalization presents, not only to social justice, but to the sovereignty of all governments whether they be federalist or of any other nature.