Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Welland for his astute observations and for bringing up a player in this entire debate that perhaps has not been focused on enough and that is the Canadian consumer, and the fact that we take for granted in this country that we have a safe and fair system of delivering food and bringing it to market. We can easily take that for granted when we start opening our borders in trade agreements to the introduction of foodstuffs from other countries.
I neglected to identify before that my own grandfather was a farmer who homesteaded on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border and began that in 1926. He was an ardent and firm believer in supply management and the need to make sure that the people who grow our food and produce, all of our foodstuffs in this country, are treated fairly.
Once again, this was reinforced last night in the meeting with the dairy producers of this country who also have made a further plea for us to remain committed to supply management in this country.
With the focus on the environment that has really begun in the last 20 years, I think it is very important that we all become very aware of the fact that we have a very clean and safe food production system. Not only that, it allows us to produce food locally, so we do not have to, nor would we want to, begin having a trade system that sees us transporting foodstuffs from thousands of kilometres away when we can produce those foodstuffs locally and consume those products locally.
Therefore, not only does it benefit our farmers, not only does it benefit our agricultural industry, not only does it benefit our consumers but it also benefits our environment by having a strong trade deal that is based on supply management and principles that go beyond simply price, and simply introducing products into this country that are cheap. There is so much more to a trade deal than just the price of cheap goods.
Once again, our party is standing up to enshrine those principles into trade legislation and the bill before the House unfortunately falls a little bit short in that regard.