Madam Chair, I want to thank my colleague, the member for Niagara West—Glanbrook who geographically is my neighbour.
I will remind him what the Thorold council said about two and a half years ago when I paid it a visit. When it came to free trade, the council said “No, thank you very kindly”. In fact so did nearly 80% of the regional governments in the region we both live in.
Nonetheless, what we need to talk about is this free trade model of which my hon. friend there are some naysayers. Let me say nay.
It is not about whether or not we want trade, which of course gets thrown back this way all the time. Of course we are a trading nation and have been since the voyageurs, but there are ways to develop trade and there are ways to develop trade differently, and what we are saying to the government is that it should explore that.
When it comes to sub-national governments, as we call them, I call them municipal governments, I call them councillors and mayors and premiers of provinces. I guarantee that the EU is looking at the Samsung plant that is supposed to go to Windsor and Tillsonburg and saying it would rather see it stay in Spain and Germany. I guarantee the EU is looking at Bombardier in Thunder Bay and saying that it would rather build those cars in Italy. I guarantee that the EU is looking at our agriculture products and saying that we cannot call that Quebec cheese by that name any more because that is not on, as far as it is concerned.
I wonder if my friend from Niagara West—Glanbrook would like to explain how indeed the flower producers in his region are going to ship those flowers all the way over to Europe, especially if they are tulips, and try to get away with it.
At the end of the day, the EU has been doing this for a long time, breaking down borders, moving back and forth. Ask it how well it is doing. Ask those folks who left Poland to go to Northern Ireland to work how they are doing when they went all the way back to Poland under the model the EU gave them. Ask them how well they are doing. They will tell the member they are doing very poorly.
Ask Canadian workers if they are better off today than they were in 1995 and the answer according StatsCan will be that they are worse off or exactly the same, and the StatsCan report actually proves it. Of course we are going to lose that soon with all that census material.
The top 1% are doing really well; those at the bottom end of course are not doing so well; and the ones in the middle, that great big chunk in the middle who we want to make sure prosper, have not.
Let me ask this. Is free trade working for workers in this country?