Madam Speaker, the public who are watching this debate today, particularly the thousands of Canadians who have written to Conservatives and Liberals asking them not to do this appalling bad deal and try to force it through the House, can see a real shift in the Conservative approach. The Conservatives are now not talking about the trade deal, and of course, they cannot because the trade deal is so egregiously bad, but they are talking about the Canadian International Development Agency.
The NDP is on record as saying we need to increase funding to CIDA, because a lot of the programs it runs, including those in Colombia, help to benefit the Colombian population. It gets around what is an appalling corrupt and murderous regime.
The problem is the regime itself. The regime is not subject to rules. The regime has paramilitary ties. As the BBC recently exposed, and as Diego Murillo, the successor to Pablo Escobar in the Medellin cartel, stated quite recently, President Uribe's successful election campaign was funded with drug lord money. Uribe has very clear ties to murderous paramilitary thugs, including the AUC, which was born in his province, flourished and spread under his governorship, and led to the deaths of more than 100,000 Colombians.
How can that member stand in the House and defend the indefensible, a regime that has committed human rights violations and is tied to drug lords and murderous paramilitary thugs?