My friend now heckles me to say that we did not vote for it. However, neither did he. How this place actually works is that from time to time, it gets along and Parliament decides to pass legislation by voice votes. Parliament decides to pass legislation together.
My friend would like to make a distinction without a difference. He did not stand in his place and vote for this trade deal. In fact, no member of Parliament stood in this place and made the trade deal. He would like to present that as somehow true, that we did not stand and support this particular trade deal. He knows it to be false. He spends enough time in this place to know how it works and he knows that the NDP supported this trade deal at committee stage and then finally at the last stage in Parliament. If that were not the case, then we would have opposed it like we have opposed other bad trade deals, like we are opposing the China foreign investor protection agreement that is selling out Canadian resources.
To my friend, he might wish to stand and correct the record and be honest with all of us here about how it works and what the NDP's intentions and actions actually were with respect to trade. We seek fair trade, not this ridiculous neo-con free trade that the member so much promotes and that his government did when the Liberals were in office, allowing 13,000 consecutive foreign takeovers to happen without once—