Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question about corporate welfare, out of deference to the former leader of the NDP, Ed Broadbent, who coined that term.
I do not know if my colleague is aware, but Canada is the third largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world. Even though most of the world is banning asbestos, we continue to subsidize and underwrite the costs of the asbestos industry in direct subsidies and in travelling the world challenging anyone who wants to ban asbestos by sending teams of Department of Justice lawyers to Rotterdam and The Hague. Anywhere they are trying to limit and contain the use of asbestos, we try to block them.
We even sent our lawyers to the WTO to block France from banning asbestos saying that we would lose the trade. Does he agree with me that asbestos, in all of its forms, should be banned first of all, but at the very least, we should stop underwriting and subsidizing this deadly substance, tobacco's evil twin, and stop these corporate serial killers from polluting the planet with asbestos?