The proud heritage of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, their logo, their traditions which have been with this country for decades, which we are all proud of as Canadians, this Liberal government, these great protectors of Canadian culture and heritage, thought it would be a good idea to exploit that Canadian tradition, that Canadian heritage, for a few American dollars.
How hypocritical can they get? They stand today to call themselves the great protectors of Canadian culture. They are so quiet over there now. I think they are embarrassed. They have been caught like a rat in their own trap.
This is about profound intrusion into the rights and freedoms of Canadians. That is this government's version of how to run this country: get its fingers into everything that goes on in this country through regulations, restrictions, sanctions, impositions or whatever it can do to control every single person to do its will or to do things its way. That is the mandate of this government. It has been since Liberal hero Pierre Trudeau came on the scene. Unfortunately he is still obviously having an influence on this government.
Members of the Liberal government are these great protectors of Canadian democracy. They should be called the great intruders.
With this bill Liberals are like people walking blindfolded into a den of snakes. The heritage minister has set herself up as the czar of Canadian publishing, the czar of the industry. She thinks that she can unilaterally put this restriction on and the Americans will just roll over and play dead. Does the minister not realize for one minute the implications of what she is trying to do? Mr. Speaker, you do not play baseball with a little tennis racket when you are playing against an American team. You have to go in with a position of strength.
The minister has just put Canada in a very tenuous position. Do we think the Americans are going to roll over and play dead because of the minister's little whim? There is not a hope. We are going to see retaliation.
Perhaps the Americans should start with the plastics industry which comes right out of the riding of the Minister for International Trade. That would be a good place for the Americans to start, and they have suggested it. Perhaps they should start with the steel industry which comes right out of the riding of the Minister of Canadian Heritage. That would be a good place to start. It is going to happen. Liberals are walking blindly into this predicament in which they are going to find themselves on the short end of the stick if they keep going down this path.
It is a sad day in Canada. It is going to be a sad day for Canadian manufacturers who are going to find, no doubt, sanctions against their products entering the U.S. Most of all, I think it is really a sad day for the freedoms of this country, the freedoms for which we fought two world wars to protect to ensure that this country would be a country where if we worked hard, if we were diligent, if we were prudent in our decisions, we could succeed. But we have a government come along and say “That was just a myth. As a matter of fact, the way we do things here under a Liberal government is the way we say it should be done”.
When I heard about this bill the first thing that crossed my mind was how many in this Liberal government bought shares in the big Canadian publishing firms. Is that the real reason? Does the minister of heritage have a bunch of shares in Maclean Hunter or Rogers Communications or Time Warner? Is that the reason? Maybe it is a personal monetary thing. Maybe there is going to be a big payoff. One usually finds that when people do very irrational and dictatorial things somewhere down the paper trail one finds a dollar amount attached to it.
One has to assume that there are two reasons for this: either there are a bunch of shares owned by this government, by these caucus members, in Canadian publishers, or the Canadian publishers are and are going to become very big contributors to the Liberal Party of Canada. It is a joke.