Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Churchill.
The debate today deals with two essential elements. The first one is the hypocrisy of the U.S. government which parades as the champion of markets and free trade but which is prepared to support narrow and sectoral business interests. That is the one that the Liberal members have spoken about.
The second important element of the debate relates to our Canadian government and its failure to protect the livelihood of tens of thousands of Canadians, whether they are in the farming or the forestry sector.
Free trade was supposed to be the panacea. We were promised that it would win us secure access to the American market. Free trade, in other words, was supposed to prevent exactly what is happening now.
The U.S. senate has just passed an amendment called the Dayton-Craig amendment after the names of the sponsors. It will make future trade negotiations even more difficult. The amendment allows U.S. senators to pick apart and renegotiate international agreements. Up until now it has been an all or nothing arrangement. We either rejected the whole package or we accepted it all. Now they will be able to pick and choose. It will render U.S. trade negotiations impotent because their word will not necessarily be their bond.
New Democrats and Canadians alike are all for trade but it has to be fair trade, not some ideological slogan that leaves us vulnerable every time there is an American lobby or an American election.
The farmers and the forestry workers have a great deal in common. They are both primary industries harassed by the Americans and they have both been virtually ignored by the government.
Like the forestry workers, Canadian farmers have endured years of harassment from the American administration. It has threatened to stop beef and pork at our border. It is now talking about country of origin labelling on a voluntarily basis. It has charged time and again that we are dumping our wheat into its market and at one point the Liberal government agreed to put a cap on wheat exports to the U.S.
Time and again the Americans have attacked the Canadian Wheat Board just as they are attacking us now on softwood. The Canadian government has been completely inept in our opinion in its handling of the softwood lumber dispute, as it has been on a wide range of trade matters.
The government has been passive when we have the tools, limited though they may be, to be more aggressive.
Just on that point, we note that $20 million was announced yesterday in a public relations campaign to convince American consumers that their government is wrong and we are right on the softwood lumber industry. That will certainly bring the Americans cowering to the table. What happened to the threat by the Prime Minister a couple of months ago when he was all puffed up after Canada won a couple of Olympic gold medals and he promised to hit the Americans over the head with the proverbial 2x4? I doubt that a $20 million advertising campaign going into the U.S. market will have any effect whatsoever. The money might as well go up in smoke.
I think Canadians are asking for some strength here. The Americans need Canada's approval, for example, for a northern gas pipeline route. So far our government has been tripping all over itself to co-operate. Why does our trade minister not tell the Americans that the pipeline approval process will be slow walked if the U.S. continues to harass the people working in our forests and on our farms?
Canadians want that kind of action. In a poll that came out last Friday in the Globe and Mail , some two-thirds of Canadians felt that the government was out of touch on trade issues and they believed that the Americans got the better of this country in trade deals and trade disputes. That is related to natural gas, agriculture and certainly to softwood.
The U.S. is so large and powerful that it inevitably gets the better of Canada in trade agreements and during trade disputes. That comment received a 65% approval rating in the poll.
This substantiates what a P.E.I. farmer told our agriculture committee when we were in Summerside this past winter. He said that when it comes to free trade the United States has rights and Canada has obligations. Another way to put it is as the Mexicans say: that when it comes to the United States they are so far from God and so close to the United States.
Seventy per cent of Canadians polled said it is unwise to have so much reliance on one trading partner. We have heard the parliamentary secretary say 85.1% of our trade is with the United States. We should be seeking other markets. We should be broadening the basket, but we have put all our eggs in this one and we are dropping and breaking those eggs. Twenty-six per cent of Canadians want Ottawa to retaliate by blocking exports of other Canadian products heading south. In other words, they would like this government to poke that government in the eye with a sharp stick.
Further on agriculture, there have been nine trade investigations into the Canadian Wheat Board and every one of them has said that the CWB is acting and trading fairly. The Americans pose as the champions of free trade and unfettered markets but their actions speak much louder than their words. They have just introduced this 10-year package which, coupled with previous packages, will amount to more than $180 billion in subsidies to American farmers, a program in which the vast majority of the money goes to the biggest and wealthiest of U.S. farmers.
The U.S. subsidies allow American farmers to produce grain at prices that may be well below market price and thus put our farmers at a great disadvantage. For the first time anywhere in the world pulse crops such as peas, beans and lentils are now subsidized in the United States. No other country in the world subsidizes those commodities.
The U.S. farm bill definitely has the potential to put thousands of our farmers out of business. This could not come at a worse time because, as we know, Statistics Canada has just reported that we have lost 30,000 farms in the past five years between 1996 and 2001. Canadian farm and political leaders are urging the federal government to provide a trade injury compensation package worth at least $1.3 billion. About $500 million of this injury will occur in the province of Saskatchewan, which has 47% of Canada's arable farmland.
Members of our caucus have supported this request. We have raised the issue in the House of Commons on many occasions, thus far to no avail despite the meeting last Friday in Saskatoon.
After its election in 1993, the Liberal government, aided and abetted by the Reform Party, began to cut support to Canadian farmers to levels well below what was allowed under the GATT agreement, the Uruguay round. As a result, today Canada's support for farmers is among the lowest of all industrialized countries. Only Australia and New Zealand are ahead of us in that.
The Americans and the Europeans argue that the subsidies they provide to farmers fall within the limits allowed by the WTO. If that is true, then Canada's support for farmers falls well short of the support limits that are allowed under the WTO.
The parliamentary secretary says he is concerned about punitive trade actions. The fact of the matter is that the agriculture committee was told many years ago, in about 1998, that Canada could put $2 billion a year into agricultural support payments without running any risk of problems with the WTO.
I realize that my time is up, but I will just make one or two very quick points in 30 seconds. First, it has to be the federal government, not the provincial governments, that steps up to the plate on a trade injury compensation package. This is international trade. It is not agriculture. Finally, we have sold away a good deal of our sovereignty but we have not lost all the tools. The world belongs to those who show up and the government has so far failed to show up on this issue. More important, it has failed to stand up for our country and its people. It had better soon do that or we will not have a country at all.