Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate of course. I will begin by saying that I applaud the Bloc Quebecois for bringing forth a motion like this in the sense that it is certainly a motion very worthy of debate. Too often opposition motions are merely designed to try to discredit the government or to gain cheap political points, but in this case this genuinely is a motion that deserves the kind of debate it has been getting today.
I have to say it is hard to mix one's own work and to try to follow a debate like this because each member who has spoken has had much to contribute and unfortunately I have not been able to follow every speech. I will say, however, that when it comes to deciding how I will vote on this issue I will, before I finally cast my ballot, look at the full Hansard and consider every argument that was put forward.
On the surface, however, from where I sit now, from what I have heard and from what I have read of this particular issue, I find myself half supporting the motion rather than supporting it fully. I certainly do believe that there is a great deal to be said in having a debate on this kind of subject before a treaty is finally ratified. Where I have difficulty is the part of the motion that says, and I should read the motion:
That this House demand that the government bring any draft agreement on the Free Trade Zone of the Americas before the House so that it may be debated and put to a vote before ratification—
The reality is that the government has a majority in this House and if this were put to this House after debate for ratification, what would happen is that the government would simply use its majority and it would go through.
In that sense it is a waste of the House's time, although I use that term very advisedly because in fact no debate in this House is a waste of the House's time.
A better way, it seems to me, to approach this is to do what happened just a few nights ago and have an emergency debate. We had, I guess, six hours of debate on the farm crisis the other night, and this was initiated in fact by the opposition I do believe. Well, both sides, actually. From the backbenches in one sense. That was an excellent debate. It touched on many, many aspects of the farm crisis and I think people watching probably gained much from it.
This whole question of a free trade zone for the Americas, which is coming up as a topic of conversation or a topic of negotiation, I should say, at the summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April, is an issue that has broad ramifications for the country. I would suggest that it goes even further than that. It has international ramifications and I think a debate would be very much in order.
Just to give you a little bit of history, Mr. Speaker, the summit that is coming up in April is part of a progress of summits that actually goes back to 1956. There was the first summit involving the Organization of American States. That was followed by a larger summit in 1967 which was initiated, I believe, if memory serves me right, by President Kennedy. That led to an attempt to bring Latin America under a free trade zone to the exclusion of the United States and the exclusion of Canada.
That did not work out in the long run, but the idea remained. The idea just sort of went into limbo for a long time. It was restarted by President Clinton in 1994 primarily because the world had changed dramatically. What had happened, the Soviet Union had collapsed; the east-west confrontation had ended; and the world suddenly became a patchwork of states, each trying to gain political advantage and, even more important, economic advantage.
Then, Mr. Speaker, you saw this progress starting in the very early nineties toward a World Trade Organization, toward global free trade in the broadest sense. We have gone very far in that direction, far in that direction in the sense that global free trade now involves countries that can trade with Canada, and the United States for that matter, and trade to their advantage and to our advantage.
Just in passing, I believe I am splitting my time with someone. I believe it is the secretary of state for international development. I certainly am sure that she will be listening to what I have to say and building on it when her turn comes.
Anyway, to carry on with the story, and I had better carry on fairly rapidly, the summit arises out of global free trade, the collapse of the Soviet Union and initiative by President Clinton. Initial talks were held in Miami in 1994 and one of the things that came out of those talks was the concept of a free trade zone of the Americas.
Remember, Mr. Speaker, these talks are not just about economics. I think as a result of the change in geo-politics, if you will, and geo-economics, it was recognized that it was in the Americans' interest, in the interest of the United States, to form closer alliances politically, economically and even militarily, and all of these issues are on the table when we come to a summit.
But the other aspect to the Bloc's motion that interested me was this concept of a North American free trade zone because I think something more is going on there than what has been the subject of the debates even in the newspapers.
I get the sense that what is happening here is that the Americans are perceiving a need to build a kind of firewall around the rest of the world: put this wall around North and South America in a sense to look after the possibility that someday they may have to shut out some of the rest of the world.
Individual colleagues made observations about human rights. I remember the member for Medicine Hat was commenting on the contradiction that we have when a country like Canada or the United States supports a third world country, only to deny access to their goods and put tariffs on their goods because of human rights problems.
We can take the example of some countries in the far east that have now just about entirely taken over the manufacture of textiles, or rugs for that matter, where these goods are manufactured in labour conditions that would be unacceptable in North America.
We face a dilemma there because if we shut off those goods, and I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, the shirt that I am wearing right now was probably manufactured at very, very low cost in a third world country.
It is my impression that the United States and Canada perceive that we cannot carry on global free trade indefinitely under such circumstances when we are indeed encouraging even child labour in these third world countries, which want to do it because they want to sell the product here, but we get into this terrible contradiction.
So the answer would appear to be something like a global free trade zone where standards can be set for human rights for the way labour is utilized to produce product, and at the same time preserve a market that will be sufficiently large for the United States to benefit primarily and the rest of us to benefit secondarily.
In the long term I have a great deal of sympathy for those protesters that appeared at Seattle and some of these other summits because I think we have to be very careful when we look at global free trade, or even the free trade of the Americas, that what we may be doing is creating dependencies that may put off a crisis among human beings, a crisis in terms of being able to produce product and feed ourselves that we may have to face in the years to come.