“Selective amnesia” my little short friend says. I like that.
We are going to Seattle in the hopes that we can negotiate liberalization in trade and protect the things that are important to Canadians. We believe we have an opportunity in Seattle to expand marketplaces for the agricultural sector.
We are already leaders, and members opposite know this. The NDP members may not be willing to admit it, but they know for a fact that we are already leaders in fields such as telemedicine and education services. Our ability to expand clearly depends on our ability to negotiate in these marketplaces. We want to use these negotiations and we are not afraid to do that. That is the fundamental difference. We go in with some confidence.
I want to tell members a story about a trip I took with the former minister for international trade, the hon. Sergio Marchi. He led a team Canada trade mission to San Francisco and I was honoured to be able to go. It was with young entrepreneurs. We saw some things.
I do not know how many members get the opportunity to go to a movie but I certainly do not often get a chance. However, I did see the IMAX technology when I was in San Francisco. The IMAX technology, which is a theatre in the round, is Canadian. It is spectacular technology.
We were in Silicon Valley in a complex in San Jose where there were thousands of people coming and going and looking at all the exhibits. Many of them were going in to watch the movie,
The Story of Everest
, about a group climbing Mount Everest. It was the most incredible sensation I have ever experienced in a movie theatre. It was in the round. The thing that was wrong with it was that it should have had a little Canadian flag on the bottom. IMAX is one of the most successful technologies and it is Canadian. It was invented by Canadians in Canada and is exported around the world.
Is that a bad thing? Is that not what our future depends on?
We were then taken to a site visit of the Alameda Naval Air Base, which is right on the bay in the San Francisco Bay area. There is a huge area right at the edge of the ocean that was a landfill site. It was far from sanitary. It was a place where we had to sign a waver because there was live ammunition around. I said, “You mean we are really going there? I am not sure I like this idea.”
They took us out and showed us the technology being employed in San Francisco to clean up this toxic and extremely dangerous naval dump site. Guess what? The technology was from Waterloo, Ontario. A Canadian company was the lead winner on the bid. We are talking about a contract that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up and stop all of the leachate going into the ocean and to eventually make the naval base into a park. There were seven companies involved in this environmental clean up project and six of them were Canadian. The main one was a Canadian firm that had invented the technology. The seventh one was a U.S. firm and its job was to truck things away. What we are talking about is the ingenuity of Canadian firms in developing environmental technologies that can clean up some of the dirtiest messes and the biggest problems in all of the world and it is Canadian.
Why not have a resolution on the floor today to say how proud we are of those Canadian industries that have invented new technologies, that have found ways to help internationally around the world and that are generating jobs. All of the money comes back to Canada on that project and the men and women who are working on that project are Canadian men and women working with Canadian technology.
I do not understand. Instead of saying “Oh, goodness, do not go to Seattle because they are going to beat you up, or if you are going to go here is the set of rules we want”, why not celebrate the success of Canadians around the world?
I have a couple of facts for the New Democratic Party. Two out of every three jobs in the country depend on trade. Exports are more than 40% of our GDP, more than any other G-7 country. Imports give consumers a wider choice and access to the best products in the world. In 1998, Canada exported $367 billion in goods and services and each billion dollar export sustains 11,000 jobs. Those are outstanding numbers.
This is a nation of traders who can and will compete internationally around the world. We will successfully negotiate and improve our position at the WTO talks in Seattle led by our minister and our team of professionals. I have confidence in them and I have confidence in Canadians.