Mr. Speaker, let us cut through the rhetoric and the nonsense here. The member asks why I am going to Quebec City and why I am opposed to the proposals of the government. I will tell hon. members something: we do not even know what the proposals of the government are because it refuses to make public the texts that are being negotiated. It is the height of sophistry for the Liberals to say “trust us, it will be good for Canadian people”.
I have great respect for the member, who chairs the foreign affairs committee, but it is absolutely absurd to ask the Canadian people to simply trust our government to negotiate a good deal even though we still cannot see the text that is being negotiated.
That summit is coming up in a little over a month from now. What we were told by the Minister for International Trade in one memorable declaration was that there is no problem, that these trade deals all look like one another anyway, so if they all look the same and are basically the same idea, what is the big deal if they cannot show us this particular text. That is our concern.
I ask the hon. member for Toronto Centre—Rosedale this: if in fact this trade deal is going to look like the other trade deals, does that mean there is going to be an investor state provision in it? Does that mean we are going to give corporations like Metalclad, Ethyl Corporation, Methanex and others the right to challenge the decisions that we as democratically elected representatives make? We do not know. We do not know because the government has refused to allow us to know. It will not make those texts public.
I want to say one other thing, and that is with respect to the point I made initially about the consultation with members of the House.
As I said, I congratulate the member for Joliette because I believe, though I may be mistaken, that this is the first serious debate we have in the House of Commons on this issue. And it is taking place two weeks before the expiration of the agreement. This is unacceptable. The Minister may have done some consulting here and there, but what have we done here, in the highest forum of Canadian democracy, where the country's elected representatives meet? Absolutely nothing. And this is unacceptable.