Mr. Speaker, the attitude of the hon. member for Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière is typical of his party. When he heard that certain members of Parliament had gone to the United States to meet with some American legislators, he made fun of the trips and called them tourist jaunts. In my view, this only shows that if he had gone, that is probably all he would have found to do in the United States. The members who went and were tremendously well received and well informed by the Canadian embassy in Washington tell us that we do not go there often enough and that we need to cultivate sustained, ongoing relations with the Americans. The American press is generally not very interested in Canada and is poorly informed about how good our security is. The Americans should not be afraid that harm will come to them from Canada.
We also need to remind them—because many have forgotten—that when the going gets tough, they can count on their friend to the north. When the American embassy in Iran was invaded and occupied, for quite a long time the Canadian embassy sheltered the American diplomats who had not been taken hostage but would have been if the Iranian authorities had found them. That reminds me of the fable by La Fontaine in which a lion is caught in a net and is finally only freed thanks to a mouse that gnaws through the mesh of the netting. La Fontaine concludes that we often need someone smaller than we are.
We should all be familiar with this situation. The Conservative government has not made the necessary effort to defend our commercial interests, which have increased tremendously since free trade was instituted. In Quebec in particular, 27% of our production was exported. Now 51% of our production is exported and 80% of that goes to the United States. There are tremendous economic advantages, therefore, to keeping the borders fluid. We did a lot before and after September 11, 2001, to ensure they remained so.
One example of regular shipments of goods is the newsprint that Quebec delivers to New York. We export a lot of other products as well. We export paper but many other things too. Our biggest export to the United States is actually aluminum. Our second largest exports are in the aircraft sector, which is a real change in comparison with the last century and the last millennium. Then comes newsprint, turbojet engines, writing paper and paperboard, advanced copper wire and casings, integrated circuits and even petroleum oils, even though heaven knows that Quebec is not the largest petroleum producer in Canada.
So we are exporting more and more sophisticated products. Before the economic crisis, we were shipping products that were a lot more advanced and required intelligent work, such as aircraft and turbojet engines, and things will have to stay that way if we want to get over this crisis. We are talking about quite sophisticated goods here.
These things have become essential to our economy.
Protectionism is a natural reaction in times of crisis. We know, though—and this is the great lesson economists derived from the crisis in the 1920s—that protectionism makes the problem worse. The borders must be kept open because we export a lot, although we also import a lot from the people we export to. There is a mutual advantage, therefore, to keeping the borders open.
The government does not seem to realize all this. At a time when we should be trying to counter protectionist tendencies in order to overcome the crisis, the government is cutting the working hours of our customs officers, rather than trying to make the border more fluid. It is also reducing the modern equipment we have for monitoring the contents of trucks. I believe it is gamma ray equipment that makes it possible to check loads quickly and therefore speeds up traffic at our borders. They are also cutting border surveillance.
When the Conservatives were in opposition in 2006, they complained mightily—like us—that nine RCMP stations had been closed and they said they would re-open them. That promise went the way of most of their promises: they are in power now but have never re-opened the stations. They are giving guns to customs officers but taking away their overtime. They are giving guns to customs officers but removing some of the high tech equipment that keeps our borders fluid. That is typical of a government that calls itself conservative and is proud that it always looks to the past and gets inspiration there for what it wants to do in the future.
Once again, I think we should be aware of the dimensions of our trade with the Americans. I have it here in absolute numbers. I said it represented 51% or $150 billion in 2007. I already listed the main products that go into this total. They are transported primarily by truck. In 2004—the last year for which these statistics are available—13.45 million tractor trailers crossed the border.
There are also 90 million people who cross the U.S. border, of whom 70 million cross by land. This government seems totally unaware of how important the border is, first of all to the Canadian and Quebec economies, but also to such other things as tourism. The most recent statistics I have come from 2006 and, on average, 27.5 million tourists were visiting Quebec each year. The tourism industry generated revenues of $10.2 billion in 2005.
I spoke about the RCMP detachments and there is no point in revisiting that. It really shows the extent to which the Conservatives fail to take steps to reassure our neighbours to the south, and make promises they never keep. We are so used to them doing this that we do not need to spend much time talking about it. It is nothing out of the ordinary.
We absolutely agree with the member for Ajax—Pickering when he criticizes this administration both for its failure to grasp how important it is for us that our neighbours to the south feel safe and for constantly acting too late.
It nonetheless significant that in the first few days she was in office, a person with responsibility for overseeing land borders would say, and believe, that the terrorists who committed the attacks on September 11, 2001, came from Canada. She did have the honesty and intelligence to correct what she had said, but what she said was in fact significant. It was certainly what she thought when she said it, and it was what the people around her thought as well. There are people around her who thought these things.
I gave the example of Mrs. Clinton, whose first reaction to the electrical failures that caused a huge blackout in North America was to say that it had come from somewhere else, that it had come from Canada. It is therefore in our interests for the Americans to be better informed about Canada.
In addition, I would remind everyone that we are allowed four trips a year to Washington, which is fairly significant. When we visit the embassy in the United States, they tell us that this information is important and there should be more of it, because American legislators, legislators in the richest country in the world, in the most powerful country in the world, do not know much about countries that do not cause trouble for them. They probably know a lot more about countries that cause trouble for them, like Iran and Afghanistan and countries in the Soviet bloc, in that era.
And so we have to take action to combat that natural tendency. The Conservatives have a tendency to do exactly the opposite. They are cutting the overtime and equipment that help keep the border fluid, among other things.
I congratulate the member for Ajax—Pickering for presenting this motion and explaining it so clearly. I share his opinion entirely.