Mr. Speaker, what my colleague has identified here is one of the fundamental problems that we now see happening, which is that while we cite trade agreements and everything, we have to go one more step forward. The one more step forward is that we need to maintain relations with our trading partners. We simply cannot get up and begin bashing our trading partners and at the same time expect favourable treatment from them.
We need to understand that we can disagree with our trading partners, but we do not need to go down to the level of personal insult that we saw taking place last year on the governing side. There was no action taken by the last government in addressing those issues.
Naturally there will be smaller frictions taking place and those frictions are going to impact ordinary Canadians. In the trade deals that we cite, and as softwood lumber and BSE indicate, yes, those other trading partners can turn their backs on us and go to where people are more friendly to them. In this case, maybe it is the southern border, but who knows?
The world is wide open. Everyone out there wants to deal with each other and wants to do work. It is up to us to make sure that while signing a trade agreement we also maintain those relationships in order to ensure that whatever was our objective in signing these deals does not come back to haunt us and impact our own Canadian citizens. In these cases, it is workers in the member's riding and workers in other ridings who are losing jobs due to BSE or it is the textile workers.
It is critically important that we have an overall policy here. We cannot pick and choose when we sign a trade deal and say that everything is fine. There is no picking and choosing. We must sit down and say that this is strategically important for us. Trade is strategically important for us. We can respectfully disagree, but we do not need to insult our trading partners.