Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today and speak to Bill C-24, an act to implement the free trade agreement between Canada and Panama. I enjoyed the comments of my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway. However, when he says that Canada should enter into an agreement with Norway, for example, he ought to remember that there was an agreement that was to come in the last few years with the EFTA countries, which included Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The NDP voted against that, as I recall.
I appreciated my hon. colleague's point that trade is essential to our economy. It is important that members recognize that and understand what arises from that.
I come from a trade-dependent province, Nova Scotia. I recognize how important these kinds of agreements are to our economy, to job creation and to our families. My hon. colleague talked about the Canada–U.S. free trade agreement. In the early 1980s, the Canadian government of Mr. Trudeau was very concerned about arising sentiments of protectionism in the U.S. A variety of tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers arising in the U.S. were of great concern, causing issues for Canadian businesses trying to sell to the U.S. The process was begun under that government of discussing the possibility of an agreement with the U.S.
My biggest concern with the way the Mulroney government approached the negotiations with the U.S. was that its approach was to say that its whole economic policy was going to be dependent on getting a trade agreement with the U.S. It said to the U.S., “let us sit down and negotiate”. What kind of position are government members in if they make it clear publicly to the counterpart in negotiation that they are not going to leave the table, that they have to have an agreement as they have told their country that it is vital to their future to have this agreement? That does not put them in a very strong bargaining position. Surely it would have been better to have entered that negotiation differently.
My difficulty with the NDP point of view is that it can never find an agreement that it can support. Members are convinced that they could have negotiated a better agreement that was far more in Canada's favour. That is nice to say. Maybe there are things that could have been done differently. However, it is a bit unrealistic to say they could have negotiated a far better agreement and gotten everything they think is important. That is not what negotiation is like. It is a two-way street. That is why my friends in the NDP have never been in favour of any trade deal with any other country, as far as I can recall, no matter how many jobs it created for Canadians or Nova Scotians or how much, for example, it helped our regional economy in the Atlantic.
If we look at the record, Canada did very well. If we look at the economic performance of Canada and the U.S. during the 1990s and the decade between 2000 and 2010, the results for Canada's economy were very strong. My difficulty with the NDP approach is that opposing these agreements is preferring protectionism. Protectionism provides temporary relief. Two hundred years ago, or a little less than that, my great-grandfather was a shipwright in Dartmouth working on sailing ships. When they started to fade away and metal and steamships took over, we could have said we were going to prevent those from coming in, that we would support with protectionism and tariffs our wooden shipbuilding industry. That might have provided some relief for a little while, but sooner or later it would have had negative impacts on the economy. The standard of living for people in this country would have gone down.
I think that is the result when we have the kinds of protectionist barriers that my NDP colleagues favour. The alternative to the U.S. trade agreement, perfect though it may have been, would have been more barriers to our products.
If we look back to 1988-90, of course the trade agreement was negotiated in about 1987, we were 90% dependent for our trade on the U.S. Ninety per cent of our exports went to the U.S. That was an enormous proportion of our economy. So, to say that we did not need to have that or that it was not good enough simply is not a good enough answer. I think we have to come up with a better argument than that.
Speaking of the impacts on Atlantic Canada, I encourage colleagues to read the recent report of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, which was produced in connection with its outlook 2012 conference. It is cleverly entitled “Let's Get Out of Here”. It presents an interesting study on how Atlantic Canadian firms are taking on the world. They are not saying, “Let's get out of here and move to Fort McMurray”. They are saying, “Let's get out of here as Atlantic Canadian businesses, move around the world and sell our products to create jobs here at home”. That is the idea that they are promoting.
Atlantic Canada has been successful in building innovation-based businesses that have been focused on niche markets, while also capitalizing on our key resource sectors. However, those key resource sectors are struggling these days. If we look at what is happening in forestry, when people in the U.S. and around the world are reading fewer newspapers, when there are as not many houses being built in the U.S., that has a huge impact on the pulp and paper industry and on the lumber industry. So, we need to have other kinds of businesses, in the new economy especially, that are creating jobs.
One constant in our success in Atlantic Canada has been a reliance on trade. Before Confederation, the Maritime provinces and now the Atlantic provinces, were very strong traders. They were known as very successful traders with the U.S. and Europe. Yet, whether we are talking about Europe, the Middle East, China or America, Canada, particularly Atlantic Canada, has enjoyed success in all major markets in the world. Not enough success, in my view, but considerable success.
The fact that our reliance on exports to the U.S. has gone from 90% to 80% over the past couple of decades is a positive thing. Although we are not quite as reliant on exports to the U.S., we are still heavily reliant. I think we can expect that, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will continue to be our most important market.
While we support this particular trade agreement, Canadian families, Canadian workers and the Canadian economy have been very poorly served by the government, which is failing in terms of its overall trade agenda around the world. While the Prime Minister and his ministers rack up a lot of frequent flyer points, jetting around the globe, they have basically ignored our key market: the U.S. We do not see much effort there.
More than $1.4 billion is traded between Canada and the U.S. on a daily basis as part of the largest commercial relationship between any two countries in the world. Yet the Conservatives have sat on their hands and watched as the border has thickened. We do not see the kind of effort there that we ought to see.
Canada's geographic, economic and cultural advantages in a North American market of nearly 500 million people will remain a major strategic asset in a rapidly evolving world, but not if we continue on the path the government has put us on.
As some of the speakers before me have noted, this trade agreement with Panama is yet another example of the current government pursuing new arrangements, at the expense of established agreements. The consequences, I think, are clear to anyone who has seen the recent trade statistics, which show declining exports and a trade deficit.
The one thing we can say about the Conservative government is it seems to be enamoured with deficits. Certainly, we know that it put the country in deficit after inheriting a $13 billion surplus. It put us in deficit by April of 2008, six months before the recession began. The government's mismanagement of Canada's trading relationship has resulted in trade deficits for the first time in 30 years. That is very worrisome. I am sure we will hear some fictions about the government's fiscal record and, we hope, about its record fiscal deficit this afternoon and the consequences for seniors, fishermen, the unemployed and just about everyone else who will pay for the Conservatives' incompetence.