Madam Speaker, we just heard from the hon. member that President Obama is wrong to recognize the protectionist risk of “buy America” provisions in the stimulus bill and that Senator McCain was wrong to try to remove the “buy America” protectionist clause from the bill. We also heard from the NDP that we would be better off bringing in similar measures in Canada and that we should be supporting the American buy America program, which does discriminate against Canadian-made goods, but we should also do our own and work together to more deeply integrate the Canada-U.S. economies, which is interesting coming from the NDP.
Beyond that, does the member not recognize the risk around the world of countries retaliating against Canada and the U.S. if we both were to engage in that kind of globophobic, socialist, Luddite protectionist measure that every other social democratic party in the world, except Canada's New Democratic Party, has rejected? Does he not realize that instead of it being a U.S. Smoot-Hawley, this would be a Canada-U.S. Smoot-Hawley that would provoke exactly the same kind of economic devastation and economic downturn globally, particularly deleterious to the Canadian and, then, the U.S. economies?