Mr. Speaker, one could argue that the only boy scouts around here are those who sit in government now and the others who sat in government before them. When they bargained the North American Free Trade Agreement, they gave away everything, including the forestry agreement, then they lost nearly every challenge to the Americans since. Therefore, one might argue that the boy scouts were those two governments and they gave things away.
We need to look at the sense of this fairness aspect to trade policy. Trade policy is about not taking advantage of one country over another. That is the intent. That is the spirit of the policy when we enter into it.
My hon. colleague talks about how much we send to Peru through the business route and how much Peru sends back to us. However, I remind my colleague that the majority of that dollar value out of Peru is raw resources and a lot of it is gold. It comes out of Peru as gold, not as finished products, and heads north and a lot of it heads back into the country to be reprocessed. We are extracting raw materials from Peru and quite often bringing them into the northern hemisphere to reprocess them into finished product of one dimension or another.
In a lot of ways Peru reminds me of Canada in its infancy 150 years ago, when we used to extract things. Some might say that this is what is happening to us again because we seem to be extracting raw materials and sending them out of the country to let someone else do things for us.
We see both things happening. Peru's industries are extraction industries, which are Canadian held in most cases. Without a question, Canadian mining corporations are some of the best in the world. They have gone to all these different countries to set up mining operations, and they have done that in Peru. They are extracting that raw material from Peru and sending it elsewhere to be processed.
The figures are somewhat skewed. They do not really give a true indication of what type of trade goes back and forth between this country and Peru. I remind the hon. member that numbers can look bad or good depending on how one tries to frame them. In this case it may look like there is a trade imbalance between us and Peru, but then again, by the time we finish the product, it may be indeed more valuable.