Mr. Speaker, I would like to tell the Minister for International Trade that I am pleased we are able to start debating this whole matter today. We are always focussing just on the process and I am anxious to see us touch on substantive issues.
That said, the opposition has not waited for government permission to call for the texts to be made public, as hon. members will recall. I believe the Minister for International Trade was surprised by his colleagues' response, the proof being that the French translation of the texts was not available. If the federal government had really thought the response would be positive, it would have started getting its texts translated before receiving the response.
I have been interested in the debates on the free trade area of the Americas for 15 years now. I have seen that the process has in fact become increasingly transparent as the result of social pressure, pressures from parliaments and parliamentarians. As far as the free trade agreement with the United States was concerned, and that was a relatively non-transparent negotiation, there was no desire to address trade issues.
When NAFTA was negotiated, there was a little more openness, but not a lot. It was the American government, at the urging of President Clinton, that finally forced Canada and Mexico to have two parallel agreements on the environment and on labour.
Now we are at another stage, the free trade area of the Americas. I willingly admit that there has been some progress as far as transparency is concerned, but not enough. It seems to me that we have reached the stage where parliamentarians need to be involved on an ongoing basis, and to have the opportunity to give their approval of any potential free trade area of the Americas agreement before government ratification of it.
It could very easily work this way: the government signs an agreement, submits it to the House, which holds a debate on it, the House approves it and then the executive ratifies it. That is the way it is done in Great Britain and in Australia, and how it will also be done in the Quebec national assembly. The premier of Quebec has in fact announced that the national assembly would vote on the agreement before the government signs it.
I believe we have got to this stage and I would have liked to have seen the government party support the amendment, which seems to me to be the stage we have reached at this time, as far as transparency and democracy in Canada and in Quebec are concerned.