Madam Speaker, that is a reason.
The things that make me nervous on the other hand are that the Prime Minister did not come out and say, “We can defend this in front of the World Trade Organization. We are right on this. We can stand firm”. He said, “We think we can justify it in front of the WTO”. That does not instil confidence in me.
It does not instil confidence in me that today two top bureaucrats were dispatched to Washington to avert a trade war. Two deputy ministers, an almost unheard of precedent, are there now trying to divert an action by the U.S. that has not even been started yet.
I do not know whether this has ever happened before. It certainly does not do a thing to instil confidence in me. In my riding of Cumberland—Colchester, we cannot afford to play games with jobs in the steel industry, the forestry industry, the plastics industry and the textiles industry. We cannot afford to be testing it and saying we think we can justify it. It just is not good enough.