Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the member on his standing ovation in Switzerland for his support for supply management in this country. I have not seen him getting many standing ovations on this side of the House on the actions of his government with respect to the Wheat Board either.
If the minister is actively supporting supply management and prepared to defend that in international agreements and in all international efforts, I want to thank him for that. I think that is what the government has to do and has to do vigorously.
As to his comments about the NDP being free traders at heart but simply do not support free trade agreements, what I said was that we believe in fair trade. Fair trade has elements of free trade, but it has elements of ensuring that we do not go into a free trade agreement and expose ourselves to the elements that other countries have built up through subsidies and through long-term industrial policies in their countries and then come knocking at our door and say, “We'd like to have a free trade agreement, remove barriers so we can come in and penetrate an industry that you haven't done a very good job of protecting”.
That is what we are saying here, that it is an industry where Canada has failed to have a proper policy. I guess the government's budget is a good example of that. There is reference made to shipbuilding and the importance of shipbuilding in the decline, but then where is the response? The response is to say, as the government whip said, “We've got all this work on our books but we're not going to do it. We're not going to do it in this budget”. We have an economic stimulus budget that is being bragged about as the greatest level of stimulation to be put into the economy in decades, but what is there for shipbuilding?
Out of the $64 billion deficit that the government plans to run in the next two years there is $175 million allocated for shipbuilding. That is not enough.