Mr. Speaker, I gave an example earlier about when I was in business for myself and my market share disappeared because competition arrived. The competition was in Vancouver which is across the harbour from North Vancouver, but it is the same principle as the border that runs between Canada and the United States. We can carry these arguments to the extreme and say to only buy stuff in North Vancouver to protect the North Vancouver industries and do not dare go across the bridge and buy something from the Staples store on the other side. It is the same principle.
What the member wants to do is to protect the industries in his region at the expense of the industries in my region. That is what it amounts to. I will give him an example.
Free trade, when it was introduced, opened up enormous opportunities for companies in my region. I have a friend who owns one and he could not trade in or export to the United States because of the tariff blocks. When Canada came into NAFTA and removed those tariffs, suddenly it opened for him that huge market of 200 million people that he could not get into before. He sells a very specialized type of equipment for the automotive industry to do with the painting of automobiles, drying and baking the enamel for small repairs. He has turned a small cottage business into an employer of hundreds of people with markets all around the world now because of the opportunity that came from the reduction of those tariffs.
I say again that because the member wants to protect one industry with tariff blocks, he punishes other industries. It is a very simplistic thing just to stand and say that there is a big industry in one part of the country and therefore we should protect it at any cost, without taking into account all of the benefits that may be accrued to other companies elsewhere in the country that is achieved by opening the markets.
In terms of subsidies, yes, we have to be concerned when we see subsidies from other places in the world to encourage our industries to go there, but the fact is that our taxes are too high in Canada. If we wanted to see more jobs than we can deal with in Canada, we would just have to eliminate the corporate taxes in Canada. Imagine if there was zero corporate tax. This is not a policy of my party; I am just throwing it out there for consideration. Imagine the rush of companies back into Canada from the United States, in fact from all around the world, to establish their plants here in Canada. As long as they could reinvest their profits in Canada, zero corporate tax would create more jobs than we would know what to do with.
Perhaps we should just reduce our taxes a little bit to be competitive with places in the United States like the member is talking about. The corporate taxes in some of the southern states are much lower than they are here.