Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Selkirk—Interlake for his remarks. In fact, I agree with most of what he said, but certainly not all. If he is growing good potatoes in Manitoba, they must be from Prince Edward Island seed. We know that.
I cannot emphasize enough, as I said in my remarks and as the member for Selkirk—Interlake said in his, that it is critical that this agreement be implemented quickly. I personally see this agreement being quite substantially different from the Canada-Colombia agreement, mainly on the human rights side. There have been tremendous gains in human rights and corporate social responsibility in Peru that we do not see on the Colombia side of the agreement, and we ought to be very concerned about that in this House.
The member asked why these agreements were not signed when the Liberals were in government, the party that balanced the books, had 10 surpluses. In two short years the Conservative government has driven the country into the biggest deficit in Canadian history. That is the sad part of the Conservative government, that in two short years it has basically driven this country away from its tremendous potential with well balanced books and the moneys that were put into research and development for the Canadian people. Now, that has all been squandered away. What we see is the red ink into the future on account of Conservative mismanagement and incompetence in terms of the economy. I had to mention that.
However, in terms of the trade agreements themselves, all that is really happening here, finally, and it differs from how the Conservatives have taken our fiscal position that we left them in and drove it into the ground and put the country into debt into the future, is that they are building on the good work that the Liberal government has done on these trade agreements.