Mr. Speaker, I put myself in the position of one of the workers who has been laid off in Smooth Rock Falls in northern Ontario. That worker is wondering what the impact of all of this is going to be on the community and on his or her family, a community that has lost 300 jobs in just the last week, with his or hers one of thousands of jobs that have been lost.
The most disturbing aspect of the statement we have just heard from the Prime Minister is that there was absolutely nothing said about what is going to happen to those workers and those communities where these decisions by the Americans, along with the fact that they were not resolved and addressed, have left them high and dry. It is an insult to those workers and those working families that their needs were not addressed today in the address from the Prime Minister. That is our first concern.
Our second concern is that an agreement that was supposed to provide fair and free trade between nations has not only been violated, but the violations have now been accepted by the Prime Minister of Canada. Indeed, he has attempted to wrap it up as a celebration day, as though we should now be happy that multinational corporations in the United States, completely in collaboration with the administration of the U.S., can impose illegal tariffs on Canadian products, and can fight every attempt to have them overturned by polite Canadians who go off to court time and again and who win time and time again, with multinational corporations meanwhile holding that money in the bank and continuing to charge these charges on any new product coming in, resulting in thousands of people being laid off.
Now we have a situation where the Government of Canada says that is okay and we are only going to ask Americans to give back 80¢ on the dollar. I can imagine the other industrial sectors now, despite the catcalls and the chirps from the members over there who of course do not want to hear the truth about this. They would rather not hear any criticism, I am sure. They would rather just hop up and applaud as NAFTA gets torn apart and as communities are left absolutely devastated by what has happened here. What we can imagine now are other major industries in North America, in the United States, taking a look and saying, “Guess what. We can take Canada on. We can slap on charges and duties. We can take all kinds of steps and it will take the Canadians years before they are willing to stand up, and when they do, they are only going to ask for some of the money back”. What a joke.
And it is despite this being in NAFTA itself. There is a mechanism, section 19 of NAFTA, which could have allowed us to say no, that all of the duties come back, that we are taking the kind of action that insists they all come back. Clearly that has not been the course for the government. It has not wanted to defend NAFTA and make it work for Canadians. That is the first conclusion we should draw.
Our national government has now left $1.3 billion of Canadians' money in the United States. The government has left it on the table. I can only imagine what the Prime Minister would be saying now if he were on the other side of the House. In fact, when he was on the other side of the House, he expressed every kind of outrage, and so did his caucus members, about money that belonged to the public being mistreated, whether it was by the former government or whether it was by the United States in these unfair and illegal tariffs. Every kind of moral outrage was brought forward by the Prime Minister to protest and now he has turned away from $1.3 billion. That money is not just abstract. It comes out of the very communities that right now have no employment.
Here is something worse. This deal will make it very unlikely that investment in Canadian industry is going to happen. Why? Because if we put investment into a mill we are going to make it more efficient and that is going to change the price of the product. That is why we do it, so that we can sell more, thus changing the very market conditions that our Prime Minister is so proud to have apparently stay the same.
This is one of the absurdities of what has been proposed here today, that we have to freeze-frame market conditions. The Prime Minister purports to have been at once upon a time an economist. I would like him to show me any market that had the same market conditions for any protracted period of time, for example, for seven years. We cannot find a case like that.
What the agreement apparently says, in the Prime Minister's own words, is that as long as there is no change in the market conditions, there will be no tariffs and quotas. In other words, there will be tariffs and quotas because markets always change and that is how markets work.
Anyone out there who is attempting to draw some solace from the words and the sugar-coated language and the thumbs up attitude of the Prime Minister better be ready to face the difficulties that are going to face this industry as a result of this agreement.
It is totally unacceptable to leave more than a billion dollars with the United States. We are being robbed of that money by the United States. It is as if a judge said it was acceptable to give back only 80% of the money stolen. As far as I am concerned, that is unacceptable.
Market conditions will change, as they do on all sorts of markets.
The Prime Minister should be straight with the people of Canada: there is no hope in the agreement that was signed, and we reject it. A great battle to protect our industry, our workers and their communities is to be expected.