Mr. Speaker, just to clarify, I did not say one or the other. I said that what we saw was a government pattern of having trade at the expense of investing in diplomacy.
As I said, Joe Clark said it best. One is better to invest robustly in diplomacy and in missions abroad than just to focus on free trade.
We need to have a strong, robust investment in our diplomacy and ensure that our embassies abroad are fully functioning and reach around the globe. We do not see that. In fact, that would do us better than focusing on one-off bilateral trade agreements only.
In terms of the bilateral/multilateral issue, it is difficult to understand, and we are not the only country to does this, why we are just pursuing bilateral agreements, saying that this is all we can do, that one day we will take all these pieces of the puzzle and it will make a multilateral, unison structure. I do not see that happening. Instead of pursuing these one-off agreements with small economies, where I am not sure the benefit is equal, we need to get back in the game of going toward the multilateral approach. That is where diplomacy comes in.
If Canada is not in the game of multilateralism, and one sees the emergence of BRIC countries, we will be left behind. We can do both, but I do not see us doing that. I see us pursuing only bilateral agreements. I am not hearing anything at all about propositions toward multilateralism, which again comes back to having reach around the world and being able to have a voice that is heard. We do not have that now.