Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend's intervention. He made an impassioned plea for free trade in the course of asking his question.
He made a point about the middle class. Mexico now has a larger middle class than we have in Canada. It is a more populous country, but it started out as a country that had a lot of wealthy people and a lot of poor people. However, free trade and other economic reforms that it has undertaken have now turned that country into a real emerging nation, one that is becoming much more prosperous with each passing day.
My friend asked whether a vote in this place on the free trade agreement would quell some of the opposition we are hearing from NDP members and some of their friends. I am not convinced it would. The NDP is philosophically so opposed to this that in some cases it pays lip service to the idea of democracy and uses it as a bit of a stalking horse because it is completely opposed to this idea. We see that almost daily in this place where it offers up example after example of arguments against the concept of free trade.
We need to remember that free trade itself is a democratic principle. It is the freeing up of people to trade goods and services as they see fit. It allows people, like my leader said, who are just starting out and have an idea to produce that idea and exchange it with others around the world or across borders. It is a democratic idea. If my friends in the NDP cannot understand that and do not appreciate that, I do not believe they are truly committed to the idea of real democracy.