Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of premises in the hon. member's question that I do not accept. I do not accept that the agreement was arrived at behind closed doors. It was on television. It was as open and transparent as it could possibly be when we had 34 heads of state together in one place. We could not have 5,000 people in the room. We do not have 50,000 people sitting in parliament.
Why will the member not stand here and say that this is an illegitimate organization? Everybody is not in the Chamber. Not everybody can walk in here. The hon. member cannot bring a constituent into the Chamber and neither can I. Why? It is because we need a way to exchange views with one another.
That does not make us illegitimate. We were elected to be there and the leaders of the Americas were elected to be in Quebec City. We need to give them the tools to do the job. The member's suggestion that they are illegitimately there is striking at the very fundamental roots of democracy that the member purports to be in favour of.
I also do not accept the fact that what took place was as a result of pressure from her party. The leadership came from the Minister for International Trade and from the Prime Minister to open up the process. The Prime Minister of Canada does not need the NDP to tell him how to run the country. That is very clear, as the last election pointed out.
The last point about the democracy clause is where I have a fundamental difference with the member. I listened to the speeches of the member's colleagues this morning. The New Democratic Party's position is as simple as this: the NDP says that other elected governments have entered into international agreements which have made them undemocratic. The hon. member does not believe there is a democracy clause, but what the hon. member forgets is that the people who entered into these trade agreements that have been criticized by everyone, including ourselves, were democratically elected governments.
If we choose to give up to international interests some part of our sovereignty to benefit more our citizens through a pooled sovereignty, that is our decision as a democratically elected people to make. That is what was taking place in Quebec City and that is what the member does not like. The member does not like the fact that other people have adopted a system of democracy and values that the member disapproves of.
That does not make them less democratic. It just makes them different. It is that difference in the world that we should be celebrating, not the imposition of one's values on everybody else in the world.