Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for asking this question.
He is absolutely right. In the long term when an investor is pouring his money into a situation, he needs investment stability. He needs to know that an investment is made and a return is expected.
The problem is that in the past when there was an investment, the nationalization, the taking away of properties, the seizing of properties, resulted in situations where there was no stability. Individual investors could not predict what was happening to their investments. Nobody, even the NDP, I am sure, will agree to throw money down the tubes when there is nothing there. No one will agree to that.
Chapter 11 and these rules we are trying to create are there to ensure that investors know what to expect and to bring stability to that system. At the end of the day, some questions about environmental and labour standards are issues that we have international bodies to deal with.
Under the United Nations we have the ILO and UNEP. These are international bodies that can bring pressure on the governments of countries where an investment is made to ensure that they have rules and laws that will protect their environment and their labour standards according to their needs. It is wrong to take other labour standards and dump them on other governments. Let them decide what their labour standards are. I must say it bothers me that the NGOs who sit here are in the best environment in the world and are trying to put their views on different countries while not understanding what other countries want.