Madam Speaker, I listened attentively to the speech being delivered by my good friend from Winnipeg. I have a great deal of respect for her.
However, on this subject we will disagree, and I will rebut her closing statements by saying that this House and Canadians should stand firmly in favour of chapter 11, should stand firmly in favour of NAFTA for simple reasons.
First, I was disappointed that she kept bridging back to using the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as her source of data. That is a rather shaky foundation given that everything the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives does and everything they write has already been written before they have begun. All of their suppositions are cemented in. There is no imagination. There is absolutely nothing that the centre does.
That is the counterpoint. If I stood up and used them as the only source, I think some members would have the same point of view.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is not a serious organization to be basing serious public policy on.
That said, chapter 11 of NAFTA extends an existing Canadian principle to our trading partners. The idea of national treatment existed before NAFTA. There would be no difference in the way that Canadian law would treat foreign companies doing business in Canada if chapter 11 were not in place. National treatment existed before NAFTA.
What NAFTA and chapter 11 do is extend to our trading partners the legal protection and the legal requirement that businesses cannot be discriminated against because of where they are from. It changes nothing in Canada. It changes everything for our trading partners.
Chapter 11 protects Canadian companies so that when they are doing business in the United States or Mexico, they cannot be discriminated against because they happen to be Canadian-owned or Canadian-based. Chapter 11 protects Canadians. It extends a Canadian principle. This is an important value.
The member is saying that we need to get rid of chapter 11. It is the very essence of NAFTA. It is the very essence of equal treatment. To say that somehow Canadian businesses are being discriminated against because of chapter 11 is mind-blowing to me, because to say that gets it exactly backwards.
National treatment for foreign companies operating in Canada existed before chapter 11. Chapter 11 protects Canadian companies so that the principle on which we treat foreign companies operating in Canada is extended to Canadian companies operating in the United States and Mexico. To get rid of chapter 11 would handicap Canadian companies and allow them to be discriminated against when operating in the United States and Mexico.
My question is, does the member not understand that?