Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate which is so important for Canada, obviously for Quebec as well, and also for our American neighbours. One of the responsibilities of the Conservative government and the Prime Minister is to ensure that both the American president and the American politicians understand this reality. Our economies are intertwined and we have no interest, none of us, in having protectionist measures such as those contained in the stimulus plan that was presented to and passed by the House of Representatives. There is also the discussion that is taking place in the Senate. We know that Senator McCain's amendment was defeated, and so we find ourselves back at square one.
I do not need to talk about the close ties between the Quebec, Canadian and American economies. My colleagues—the member for Sherbrooke in particular—covered that. However, it is important to remember that, for Quebec in particular, this trade is extremely important. Today we find ourselves in a situation where, because of Quebec's dependence on oil—which is true for the rest of Canada as well, but since Canada exports oil to the United States, it is not as obvious as in Quebec's case, since we do not produce or export oil—Quebec's trade balance, whether in terms of foreign partners or Canadian provinces, is currently running a deficit of $7 to $8 billion.
I mentioned earlier that this dependence on oil was important because it is one of the significant causes of this trade deficit. We know that our oil imports in Quebec represent nearly $6 to $7 billion, which explains a large part of the trade deficit.
Obviously, where the advantage lies is with our American partners. In fact, we in Quebec have a trade surplus with the United States of around $5 billion. If protectionist policies became the norm in the U.S., we would have an even worse problem. In fact, we already have a problem in terms of trade which is, as I have said, related to our oil dependency, but also to the fact that, for some years, the Canadian dollar was inflated, by oil exports from Alberta to the United States in particular. This inflated dollar did a considerable amount of harm to the competitive ability of manufacturers, particularly those in Quebec, but the same is true for Ontario. We amuse ourselves by repeating this, though it is far from amusing: even the government ought to have twigged to that as early as 2007.
I like saying—and again not because it is amusing, but rather because it illustrates the extent to which the government was asleep at the switch—that in the Minister of Finance's economic statement in October 2007, on page 28, there was a lovely table showing that all industrial sectors had been declining since 2005, with the exception of oil and hydrocarbons. So steps should have been taken as early as 2007, even 2006, to help the manufacturing sector. There was a refusal to take such actions, and unfortunately the budget of last week continues that tradition. Once again, there is significant aid to the automotive sector, in the form of loan guarantees, but nothing for the forestry sector and nothing, or next to nothing, for aerospace. When we think, for instance, of the $170 million over two years for all of Canada, including Quebec, for the forestry crisis, we can see that this is pretty puny as support goes. Annually, it works out to about $10 to $20 million for Quebec. That is clearly inadequate, particularly since Quebec is there the forestry crisis has hit the hardest.
It is extremely important to us for the Conservative government, the Government of Canada, to set this campaign of persuasion against protectionism as its number one priority.
We in the Bloc Québécois hope that this protection issue, which is at risk of pitting Canada against the United States, can be solved by diplomatic means, rather than through the courts.
I must say that I was somewhat surprised. When it is a matter of diplomacy, we feel that things have to go beyond a phone call from the Prime Minister to the American President—and we do not know if that call has even been made—to tell him that one of the provisions in his legislation poses a serious problem for us, and we think that it is in neither his interests or our own for that provision to be maintained. One expects the government and the Prime Minister to be extremely active on the diplomatic level. Yet we learn from a Canadian Press report that the Prime Minister of Canada called Mexican President Felipe Caldéron yesterday evening, that is on February 4. Mexico is one of the three partners in NAFTA. One of the agreements seems not to be respected by the House of Representative provisions, and it is currently under discussion in the Senate. That agreement seems to be at cross purposes with NAFTA, according to nearly all Canadian and Quebec experts. One might have thought that the Prime Minister would have been on the phone to the Mexican President as soon as the American intentions were made public, with a proposal that they join forces against this rise in U.S. protectionism. But no, it took the Prime Minister somewhere between 10 days and 2 weeks to make the call to the president of Mexico, one of the three partners in NAFTA.
I seriously wonder what the Prime Minister and the Conservative government have done to try to coordinate their actions with the Europeans. We need to remember that under the provision of the bill, which is currently before the Senate and was passed by the House of Representatives, this protectionist measure will apply not just to Canadian steel, but to all manufactured products, wherever they come from. So the Europeans, like us, have a vested interest in seeing the protectionist approach in President Obama's recovery plan disappear.
We have no evidence that the Prime Minister took the initiative to get on the phone and secure the European Union's support. Reference has been made to the World Trade Organization rules. That may be a less direct route than NAFTA, but there are provisions to prevent the use of protectionist measures. For example, I am thinking of the clause providing for reciprocity between WTO trading partners. If Canada agrees to allow American steel into our country, then the Americans have to agree to let in our steel.
These provisions must be used, not aggressively, but simply to tell the American President and American politicians that rules were created in times of economic growth to address problems during times of difficulty or crisis. Trading partners must not take the first opportunity to abandon the rules they created to manage crises, because we are in a crisis. I wholeheartedly share the opinion of the movers of the Liberal motion. Everyone knows that a rise in protectionism will only exacerbate and prolong the economic slowdown. We need to learn from the 1930s.
In closing, I want to remind this House that in the United States at present, and particularly with the new Democratic administration, there is an awareness of international trade and globalization that, unfortunately, the Conservative government does not have. I am thinking of all those measures that are needed to create a balance between healthy competition and a certain number of rights.
That may be the crux of the problem in the United States. Like many Quebeckers and Canadians and workers around the world, they felt that freer trade in recent decades benefited only people with capital and was not in workers' interests. And that has to be corrected. Unfortunately, that feeling is not reflected on the other side of the House.