Madam Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's comments and on the surface there appears to be something wrong with the reasoning. I want to challenge him on it.
When he refers to the WTO as being an unelected body, one could use the exact same argument for the ILO. The same countries are members. I have never heard him or his party suggest that when there is a ruling from the ILO that we do not agree with or when an ILO member country interprets a ruling that does not agree with us, that we threaten to withdraw from it, or contest it in some way stating that the organization is illegitimate because the members who sit there are not directly elected.
The next proposition attached to that is that most of the same powerful countries that he talks about are democracies. The democratically elected governments of various countries appoint their representatives to those international organizations.
Finally, we happen to have a parliamentary system of government. Our ministers are elected; at least they are as MPs. In the United States, France and a number of other countries, the ministers are not elected. The ministers within those democracies are not elected. If that is the threshold, then why is it applied so selectively?
That does not mean I agree with every WTO ruling. Certainly the fact is that some of them are not respected from time to time. But I am glad to see, for instance, that the United States is at least there.
We remember that under the GATT previously the United States was not even a member until well into the 1950s. It did absolutely everything it wanted to do. At the present time, I agree that it does not listen to everything we say. At the same time, we have to work to make the institutions stronger, not weaken them by undermining them by our statements in this place.