Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to follow my colleague for Rivière-du-Nord and her learned presentation. We share many of the concerns raised by my colleague. This is the second time today I have spoken to an issue brought forward by my colleague for Rivière-du-Nord. She is having a very illustrious day in the House of Commons today.
The position of the NDP has always been that we are not opposed to free trade providing that it is fair trade. We sounded the alarm in the 1980s when the first free trade agreement was introduced. We cautioned people that the globalization of capital was not some force of nature, that it was not like gravity or the conservation of mass. This is a choice made by nation-states on behalf of corporations. The free trade agreement and the NAFTA became like a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations to move freely and override the sovereignty of nation-states.
What we cautioned then, we continue to caution today, which is that there is an erosion of sovereignty associated with the free trade agreements that we have entered into so frequently and freely since the early 1980s when the first FTA was put into effect.
Mr. Speaker, you know that I am a socialist and a trade unionist and you should also know that I am a fiercely proud Canadian nationalist. As such, on all of those fronts, we are dedicated to a multilateral point of view. We are dedicated to elevating the standards of wages and working conditions for people all over the world, not just for Canadian workers but for the international movement of workers' rights. The international solidarity of workers' rights is alive and well. In fact, it is the free trade agreements entered into so freely by nation-states around the world that have revitalized the importance of workers coming together through their free trade unions, where such free trade unions are allowed, and through the international plenary umbrella of international organizations of those unions.
It seems that we alone are standing to try and caution people about the predictable consequences of some of the causes associated with what are called free trade agreements, such as the one we are contemplating today.
The international trade critic for the NDP, my colleague for Burnaby—New Westminster, has been a tireless champion of these issues. Again, this is not to be negative and try to criticize the concept of freer trade, tearing down barriers to trade or some of the non-tariff barriers to trade. Granted, we want the free movement of capital and of goods and services. We even want the free movement of people around the world. However, we also suggest that when there is the globalization of capital there must also be the globalization of labour rights, human rights and environmental standards. We want to harmonize at the highest common denominator, not the lowest, and that has been the actual empirical evidence in many of the free trade agreements that we have now had the luxury of time to study.
The old yarn put forward by the neo-Conservative movement that a rising tide lifts all boats, is not in fact true. If our boat has a hole in it, it does not rise with the tide. It simply stays down. We watched this movement propel itself around the world and, frankly, capitalism does not had a very good name lately.
When I announce that I am a socialist, I guess it is no surprise because we are all socialists now. We just bought General Motors. I always thought that one of the signs of the apocalypse would be when General Motors went bankrupt. Is that not when the four horsemen appear on the horizon and there is darkness at the break of noon when GM goes bankrupt?