Mr. Speaker, I am not at all surprised that there is confusion. As we look around this Parliament, all we see is mass confusion. One of the things I did want to touch on, apart from saying that the Belgian government is absolutely against this trade agreement, is the reality that multinationals have interests in Colombia. There are all kinds of important resources there, including oil and gold.
I do not think that it is at all a coincidence that when the Americans built their military bases in Colombia, they built them over oil fields. I wonder who they were protecting and exactly what they were protecting. In the case of Canadian mineral companies, I know that Canadians were involved in the extraction of gold. If one knows anything about the extraction of gold in Colombia, one would know that it used to be done by villagers and the community. They would extract the gold and sell it.
Some years ago, at the insistence of multinationals, the Colombian government nationalized these gold fields and cut them away from the villagers. When the villagers tried to reclaim their homes and their way of life, they were faced with paramilitaries and slaughter. It would seem to me that, in light of this kind of reality, we should be questioning what any government supporting a free trade agreement with Colombia has as its motive.