Mr. Speaker, earlier this year I asked the trade minister what he was doing to defend Canadian firms like Hayward Gordon in Halton Hills against U.S. protectionism. The minister said he would simply monitor the situation to ensure that the Americans were playing by the rules. But he did not seem to know that the rules do not apply to state level or subnational level government procurement. So the problem was not that the Americans were not following the rules. The problem was that the Canadian trade minister did not know the rules.
How can Canadians have confidence in a Conservative government too incompetent to understand our own trade agreements?