Madam Speaker, the hon. member and I could reflect together on the various ways in which the role of members of parliament, and the role of parliament itself, has been eroded since we arrived here in 1979.
Many are the things that the parliament we first sat in could have considered as legitimate policy options, which are now proscribed and prevented by various regional and global free trade agreements. These are policies having to do with protection of culture and magazines; policies establishing and maintaining a generic drug regime; policies on regulation of the environment; and policies, if we believe the Liberal government, with respect to whether or not we can institute a national ban on the export of bulk water. The list goes on of things which the parliament that the member and I sat in 1979 and in 1980 had power over and that this parliament no longer has power over because of the WTO and because of NAFTA.
Anyone who is concerned about democracy, and I invite my friends on the right wing of the political spectrum to consider this, should be concerned about this erosion of the power of the people's elected representatives.
We often hear them going on about how the supreme court is somehow eroding the parliament. However it is okay to lose power to the WTO, which does not judge things according to all the criteria that a supreme court judge would, but only judges things on the basis of whether or not they impede trade, and generally that amounts to whether or not they impede the profit strategies of global corporations. It is not okay for the NDP. That is what unites all the people who are concerned about the current corporate globalization model.
We know that the world is a smaller place. We know that we live in a global village. We were using this kind of language long before the right wing ever picked it up and used it as a cover for reducing the world to a global marketplace or a global flea market instead of a global community. We know that language. However we hate to see that language be perverted.
What unites people on the streets of Seattle and Quebec City as well as in parliaments around the world is the concern that control of our social and economic lives is being abdicated to unelected bodies, unelected bureaucracies, which administer so-called multilateral trade rules that are designed by and for large corporations.
It is a form of corporate rule which we reject and which we think the Canadian people reject, particularly when they see that this kind of corporate rule is systematically eating away at everything they value about being Canadian. Whether it is their health care system, their agricultural system, their cultural industries and so on, all these things are being attacked by this economic fundamentalism that we see enshrined in the WTO and elsewhere.