Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate hearing the member for Mississauga—Brampton South, and I appreciate his work on committee. However, I cannot let the comments that he just made go by. I have a lot of respect for him personally, but to say now that the Liberal Party suddenly woke up to the fact that the softwood sellout has been incredibly detrimental to the softwood communities across the country just defies imagination.
The softwood sellout came from a Liberal minister who crossed the floor and brought it to the Conservative Party. The only good environmental thing the Conservatives ever do is recycle old Liberal policies. The Conservatives brought it to trade committee. As the parliamentary secretary even admits, Liberal members on the trade committee forced through the softwood sellout, even though we knew it would result in thousands of lost jobs. Then the Liberals Senate pushed it through before Christmas.
Liberals have their fingerprints all over the crime scene. Yet the member for Mississauga—Brampton South tries to pretend that the Liberals woke up to the fact that 5,000 jobs were lost within weeks of this incredibly irresponsible sellout being put into place, Conservatives being assisted by their accomplices in the Liberal Party.
I cannot let that go by. It simply defies imagination that anyone could try to pretend the Liberals were not duplicitous and explicitly involved in every stage of the softwood sellout.
I want to come back to the member's point about the Liberal Party and water exports. The Liberals, among the many promises that they broke after 1993, had promised to ban the commercial export of water, but never did so, which is why we are in this precarious position today. In 2002 a Liberal government actually opposed installing water as a human right.
How does the member, who I respect a lot, mesh all these contradictions with the comments that he just made in the House?