Mr. Speaker, I compliment my colleague for his excellent speech on the subject. It is interesting to listen to people from different political parties speak to the subject. However the detractors of free trade keep trotting out Ethyl Corporation and Metalclad as examples of chapter 11 without any knowledge or thorough understanding of it. They just say the corporation sued and the corporation won, but there seems to be no deeper understanding of the issue than that. However that is not the basis of my question.
I wanted the hon. member to comment on the assumption which has been spun that there is swelling support of young people against free trade. I am the youngest member of the House. I am speaking uniquely for myself, unlike other young people who are active in politics and who claim to speak for all young people.
Members of my family have left Canada because of high taxes and lack of opportunity. They came from British Columbia where the NDP governs. They decided that high taxes and shutting off trade was not the way of the future.
I also want to speak to the issue of civil society. We have heard this term trotted out by Maude Barlow and her ilk, that they represent the burgeoning group of civil society. They say that those who oppose free trade are examples of civil society.
Any serious political scientist who understands the nature and root of the ethic of civil society, where it comes from in communitarianism, knows for a fact that the term civil society is being hijacked by the radical left.
Civil society is organic people coming together and voluntarily deciding that their ideas have a common cause through community instinct. It is not the well informed and badly intentioned leading the badly informed and well intentioned, which is precisely what happened in Quebec City.
My question is for the member for Kelowna. What does he think of the hijacking of people by the radical left that claims to speak for all young Canadians, the hijacking of the good ethic of communitarianism and real civil society that represents people?