Mr. Speaker, Canada has the greatest mining industry in the world and is the biggest exporter. We are all over the world. By and large we do a fantastic job but every once in a while a rogue company comes up.
In my international work I had to travel to one country to solve terrible local laws that were going to be passed against Canadian investment in general. It would have hurt all sorts of Canadian companies because of one operator. In another country there was a cruel dictatorship. Once again a Canadian company was implicated. There are only a handful of these type of operators sometimes causing problems for us and for our great mining industry which is a world leader. I am sure that is why the industry signed on to this report. It would help companies as much as anyone else to get this in place so that we did not have these rogue operations.
My question is a little off topic. One of the complaints I hear is that the local government is not enforcing the rules. Primarily these companies should be caught by local legislation and enforcement but that is not occurring.
Could the member comment on Canada's foreign policy and our place in the world? In my view we have reduced the investments that we are making in diplomacy. We have reduced the investments that were helping the democratic evolution of new countries, of fledgling democracies. If we were to put more effort into some of these countries, they would be able to protect themselves not only from rogue investments from Canada, but from all the companies in the world that may try to exploit aboriginal and other people in a country that has not yet developed sufficient laws and enforcement of its own. I think that is the type of role Canada has traditionally played.