Mr. Speaker, we have pretty well heard most of what the hon. member has to contribute. He summed it up himself just now: fear, ideology and spin. That pretty well sums what he really had to say.
The member wants to look, in a serious way, at leaked documents. What is a leaked document? Who even knows? The member says this deal should be over. Is that based on a calendar? Should this be done by the calendar or on the quality of the agreement?
The minister has briefed the committee. He has been to the committee. We have had trade officials at the committee. We have had Steve Verheul, who is our chief trade negotiator, at the committee. It is absolute nonsense that somehow the European Parliament is better briefed than our own parliamentarians. It is a false statement, clearly.
We have been to the European Parliament, and we listened to this nonsense before we went. When we got there, we found out that the European parliamentarians on that trade committee were not nearly as well briefed as we were on the facts of the agreement.
The reality is that this agreement is being negotiated. People do not do negotiations in public or in the press, unless they are the NDP or trade unionists, using it to leverage some type of gain. In this case, I would call that some type of supposed political gain.
For the member's own province, for the first time, we are looking to get Canadian fish and seafood into the European Union duty free. That is a huge boost for British Columbia, with a great potential for the wild fish industry in British Columbia.
In the last three years British Columbia shipped somewhere in the neighbourhood of $324 million worth of lumber into the European Union. If we could lower those tariffs, if we could move that lumber into the European Union duty free, that would be a tremendous boost for the province of British Columbia.
In closing, I would emphasize that this is not going to be negotiated on the calendar and it is certainly not going to be negotiated by the opposition. When this deal is final, it will be debated in this place where it should be debated. It will be before the committee and we will study it in depth, as our responsibilities require us to do.