Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join with my colleagues this afternoon to speak to this bill, a bill that is us causing some real concern.
New Democrats have a tremendous interest in everything fair and just. I do not see much fairness and justice in moving ahead holus bolus in the way we are. We have seen so many free trade agreements come before the House in these last few months. This is another in a series of agreements that the government has chosen to aggressively move toward signing, without really considering the long-term and short-term ramifications to workers, the environment and particularly to the people of Panama, as we challenge them to live up to some of the international accords and agreements that so many countries have signed, such as the environment, the rights of workers and that kind of thing.
I spoke on the Colombia free trade agreement not that long ago. I will make some of the same arguments tonight that I made then because it is not that dissimilar an agreement to the one in front of us.
Canada is entering into an arrangement with a country that has a questionable track record with regard to looking after its workers, protecting the rights of workers to organize and protecting the environment. Not to speak of the impact that all of this will have on the domestic economy of Canada, which is what we should be most concerned about right now.
Across Canada we are working hard in community after community, with provinces doing their bit. However, the federal government in many ways is missing in action, because it is so focused on these kinds of initiatives.
We are pulling ourselves out of the recession and are trying to find ways to create work, get people back to work and get our own local domestic economy in place. We need to rebuild communities that have been challenged, threatened and shattered so badly.
The collapse of the global economy and the financial system was in many ways affected by the rush of countries, like Canada, the United States and others around the world, to deregulate and get into global trading in a way that was not well thought out. In doing that, they forgot that the end result of anything we do, in terms of an economy and trading and work, should benefit people, communities and the country.
The free trade agreements all started by the late 1980s, early 1990s when Brian Mulroney and his government of the day delivered the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Then we saw the Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin Liberal government come into power. We thought it would revisit and rethink some of this and in fact sit down with our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement and fix some of the obvious shortcomings. However, it did not do that. It did more, from right-wing ideology point of view, to fast-track free trade, not only with the United States but with Mexico as well.
In doing so, it got us into a vortex that has seen the lives of working men and women in Canada become less and less valued. The standard of living has been reduced. The amount of money being spent on programs to support people has been reduced significantly. The role of government has been questioned and reduced.
If we are to continue down the road of free trade agreements, and particularly in this instance of a free trade agreement with a country of questionable labour practices, we end up with is a local domestic economy in Canada that is less than it has the potential to be.
In the mid-nineties and into the late-nineties, Paul Martin moved to deal aggressively with a deficit and tried to create an environment in Canada that was more conducive to this free trade regime. As he began to see the result of that deficit fighting, the program cutting, the government reduction and an improving economy, instead of rethinking that approach to public life in Canada and reinstating some of the programs and money that flowed to provinces and municipalities to support people, he began to give huge corporate tax breaks.
We were told and bought into a way of thinking that we could reduce government spending, which is another way of speaking about reducing deficit because all governments have a deficit and they keep it in balance with the GDP, et cetera. However, as we reduce government spending and the role of government in the public life of a country and as we deregulate more and more industry and reduce the amount of taxes coming in through business and corporations, a number of things begin to happen. One is the government loses its ability to intervene, to be helpful and to support the people that it is elected to serve. However, the thinking is if we do that, we make ourselves more attractive to foreign investment. That is why we can then sign on to more of these free trade agreements. People want to come here and take advantage of some of the human resources and natural resources that are available to us in Canada. However, the rules that attend these free trade agreements are not necessarily in the best interests of the people in the jurisdiction in which the agreement is being implemented.
For example, I was up in the Northwest Territories two weeks ago at a poverty conference. People from every community across those territories gathered in Yellowknife to speak about poverty. Two members of the legislative assembly in the Northwest Territories moved a motion to introduce an anti-poverty strategy, something that six other provinces have done.
In developing this strategy and looking at the needs of the people they are trying to serve and trying to improve the lot of citizens in the communities that they work in, they are turning to their provincial governments. The provincial governments in turn, as they roll out their anti-poverty strategies, are looking to the federal government for involvement, to be engaged, to give leadership, to come to the table and provide resources.
However, the federal government is saying that it does not have the money because it has a huge deficit to deal with now because of the collapse of the economy and the difficulty in the financial world. The government of the day is putting together a plan to deal with the deficit that will be in keeping with the track record we have seen over the last 10 to 15 years our country.
Before we do anything else, before any other priority, including dealing with poverty, we have to ensure we are creating a climate—