Mr. Speaker, I want to acknowledge, not just because it is Valentine's Day, that the last question the member asked was a pretty fair question.
Would people not expect New Democrats to be among those who are saying for heaven's sake, get those commercial issues and trade policy matters as far away from foreign affairs as possible? In that way decisions would be made entirely on the basis of what is in the interests of peace in the world, or what is in the interests of the most genuine human development or overseas development policies that we should adopt. I would give two responses.
Increasingly a concern which people have, and certainly which New Democrats have, is that the government would like nothing better than to remove trade policy as far as possible from humanitarian policy and peacekeeping policy and so on. It would do so precisely to avoid issues about whether the trade policies being pursued do more damage than good to our overall commitment to reduce poverty in the world, or our overall commitment to ensure that we contribute to peace in every way possible.
The reality is that either our trade policy adds further problems to the world's poorest nations, or the opposite. The reality is that our trade policies are either consistent with many of the international obligations into which we have entered as a matter of foreign policy, or the opposite. We cannot divorce the two altogether.
The second thing I would say is that if something is not broke, let us not fix it with misguided policies. I am not saying there is not always room to improve what we are doing within foreign affairs, and a foreign affairs that is in tandem with international trade. However, there has to be some willingness to recognize that Canada has distinguished itself internationally with the kinds of policies and practices by and large that have been implemented under the joint department which was put together I believe in 1982.
Twenty-three years later, one should never argue that we should go on doing it because we have always done it, but there is a very powerful argument for continuing with them under the same umbrella because it has worked well, by and large. There are things we could do to improve it.
In the meantime there are a lot of other priorities that are more pressing for the use of the public dollar, for the use of our personnel who get utterly exhausted in the process of this disentanglement and distracted from the job at hand. Just to create the appearance of newness around something that is generally applauded and appreciated in its current form is not a smart policy to pursue. It does not seem very practical to me.