Mr. Speaker, I will do something a politician does not often do, which is to admit my ignorance with respect to the maritime element of the softwood export industry with regard to the United States. I cannot intelligently comment or respond to his questions and I will not attempt to do so.
I will say, however, that we are four-square for free trade in lumber generally because the countervailing measures the Americans are about to impose would be very detrimental to tens of thousands of working Canadians, including many members of unions who no doubt support my hon. colleague's party.
Regarding his assertions with respect to Mexico, my understanding is that living standards and incomes have risen as a result of the free trade regime. Indeed, Mexicans recently elected, in the first really vibrant democratic election in their history at the national level, President Vicente Fox, a strong champion of free trade, who will be at the FTAA summit in Quebec City and will later travel to my own home city of Calgary.
President Fox was elected in part by the Mexican people because they saw his advocacy of freer trade, less protection, less regulation, better multilateral relations within the hemisphere and bilateral relations with the United States as an integral part of paving the way to prosperity for that country. Mexicans had a choice in their election.
The hon. member's colleagues talk a lot about democracy and suggest that the FTAA somehow undermines it. When it comes to the Mexican people making a sovereign, democratic decision, and the most significant democratic decision in their modern history, they chose a free trader. They chose an advocate of the FTAA.
I do not suggest the member for Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore is guilty of this, but I do believe there are some in this place, and in the country, who are guilty of a paternalistic attitude toward people in the developing world, that they do not know what is best for themselves.
The Mexican people spoke pretty clearly about what they thought was in their best interests in a democratic election when they endorsed President Fox's agenda for free trade and economic growth. If we are truly committed to democracy, rather than throwing Molotov cocktails at police in Quebec City, we should listen to the citizens and the electorates in the developing world who are choosing democracy, free markets, free trade and rejecting closed economic systems that have failed them for too many decades.