I heard an Alliance Party member ask what is wrong with that. The Alliance Party members never did get it. These are people who make absolutely no differentiation between foreign ownership and Canadian ownership. That is their position, but it is not the NDP position.
It used to be the Liberal position. There was a time when the Liberal Party was known as a party that tried—sometimes in its own feeble way, but nevertheless it tried—to defend the interests of Canada and to defend the notion of Canadian ownership against foreign ownership or at least against a percentage of foreign ownership that was seen to be a threat to Canada's ability to control its own destiny. Those days are gone forever, it seems, those days of the Liberal Party's foreign investment review agency, the Liberal Party's national energy policy and the Liberal Party that was against free trade.
We now have, with the exception of the NDP, and sometimes only recently the Bloc, and then again only some individuals, a political monoculture in the House that seems to accept that it is just fine to have a marketplace dominated by the Americans, aided and abetted by a weak Canadian dollar which provides an opportunity for our entire country to be bought up at fire sale prices by the Americans, a political monoculture that says this is just the invisible hand of Adam Smith working itself out. God is in his heaven and the invisible hand of Adam Smith is doing its work here on earth.
We do not subscribe to that particular creed and never have. We see this bill as one more opportunity for not what we would call the invisible hand but more like the mailed fist of Adam Smith crushing the possibility of Canada ever becoming anything like the independent country that it used to be.
At least my Conservative colleagues, a shadow of their former selves numerically but obviously not in intellectual stature, ran in 1984 and said they wanted to get rid of the foreign investment review agency and the national energy program. They wanted to let the marketplace do all these things. They at least were intellectually honest about what they wanted to do. I am being more than fair to them, because there were a few things that they were not really honest about. By and large they said they wanted to deregulate. They said they wanted to sell out the country and when they got elected they did sell out the country, so people got what they voted for.
The real tragedy here is the Liberal Party. This is the real source of pathos, tragedy and betrayal in Canadian politics. The Liberals are the people who once said they wanted to defend the country. These are the people who used to be in favour of regulating foreign investment. These are the people who said they were against free trade. These are the people who used to worship at the knee of Walter Gordon and others, yet not one of them would qualify any more as a disciple of Walter Gordon. They probably have never even heard of him.
This is the real tragedy in Canadian politics, that those who would defend the country, its economy and its ability to have some control over its own economic destiny have been reduced to a remnant by the political monoculture that has ensued since the passage of the free trade agreements. This particular bill is just one more step along the way. We register our opposition to it.