Mr. Speaker, I am very glad that the parliamentary secretary asked me a question because I have a question for him. If he gets a chance, I would like him to give us the answer.
It is a simple question about China. I would like to know which six provinces are represented in the United States, in Washington, on the softwood lumber issue. I could not find that out.
Moving on to the question the parliamentary secretary asked me, I totally believe in rules based trade. I not only believe in it because of trade issues and because it provides consistency and usually an appeal process, but because it is just a natural way to do business. It ends up extending into human rights issues and rules based societies. I do not believe that in this day and age we can remove human rights from trade issues completely. They are affected by each other.
As far as Kofi Annan's comments are concerned, I can think of specific cases where people are asking for more opportunities and more broadly based economies which would result from free trade and trade agreements.
Going back to Colombia, many of the people in the drug trade business say “We will get out of the drug trade business if there is an option, but there is no option for us. Give us other options. Let us do anything. Give us other opportunities, other ways to make a living, so that we can feed and educate our children”. However, there are no other ways so they resort to the drug trade.
I certainly look forward to the parliamentary secretary's answer to my question.