Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the Group No. 6 amendments to Bill C-19. From the debate we have heard it appears that whenever one challenges the established order, one runs the risk of being called names. Symbolically what has transpired is that other parties in the House have been calling Reform names on this issue which is most unfortunate.
Forty per cent of British Columbia's gross domestic product comes from exports. The real question here is how to optimize society's benefits and at the same time create an enlightened framework for labour-management negotiations in those areas of federal jurisdiction. Just so people do not get confused on this issue, we are talking about a small portion of Canada's workforce which is associated with federal areas of jurisdiction.
I have a special place in my export file for forest products. I do that because the products from our forests are Canada's largest net export. This is something which is overlooked by virtually every walk of life in this country, particularly by politicians and our own bureaucracy. They are not our highest value export but we import almost no forest products. Having spent 20 years working in this business prior to my coming to the House of Commons, I know this has always been a bone of contention. It is overlooked. In any national strategy it is important to look at the net impacts of many of our exports.
The automotive trade represents 26% of our exports which is wonderful and marvellous and does a lot of great things, but we have a lot of automotive imports as well. It is a very different issue and a different strategy should apply.
With this set of amendments Reform is saying that we need to extend protection to all commodities. We cannot selectively experiment with protecting one group or commodity. To do so puts us in a perilous position. It also distorts the collective bargaining process. It tends to distort everything. Other members of my caucus have talked about the employer groups, the producer groups, the manufacturer groups, the exporters, all west coast based and all very concerned that anything other than equal treatment for commodities will lead to all kinds of difficulties.
In my view any treatment other than equal treatment for all commodities will lead to a need for constant government supervision, constant government intrusion and discriminatory treatment which will lead us who knows where. We will be monkeying with this legislation forever. We will be monkeying with the whole collective bargaining process. This is not good news at all.
One of our backgrounders describes this as an uncontrolled experiment being conducted by the federal government. There is an ongoing commission to review grain handling and the transportation system. It is reviewing that whole business in terms of labour relations. It is the Estey commission. That commission will not report until the end of this year.
In the meantime none of the legislation is based on anything substantive or concrete. It simply is not fact based. To justify it on the basis that it is temporary when it is so arbitrarily discriminatory and targeted makes no logical sense. The only conclusion that one can come to is that there must either be some special interest at work or some collective feeling that somehow this will make someone's life easier in this jurisdiction. Surely those are the wrong reasons to be doing what we are doing.
There has also been a suggestion that by somehow selectively targeting provisions in the act to only apply to grain will prevent labour disputes from escalating because grain can no longer be used as the commodity that will be at risk. That is also illogical. The same argument could be used for all other excluded commodities. As we know forest products represent by far the largest dollar value commodity moved through Canadian west coast ports.
We can identify no one who actually wants the legislation other than the people who created it and they are rather anonymous. We also know there is a split in cabinet over it. Once again we have the spectre of the west coast being burdened with a piece of legislation to its detriment by a non-west coast based group. This certainly does nothing to pull the country together.
We also seem to have a non-recognition of the marketplace serviced by the port of Vancouver. For example, the Asian market is the marketplace in the world that places the highest premium on predictability and timely delivery. That is a crucial consideration. The bill must address that issue and it must address it on a very even handed basis.
I will get back to softwood lumber. We have a circumstance where the government's posture on the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber agreement is that the agreement gives greater predictability for Canadian exporters that are planning to ship softwood lumber to the United States. There are thousands of British Columbians out of work because of that softwood lumber agreement. It is one more example of how the west coast cannot seem to permeate the bureaucracy that creates west coast based legislation.