Mr. Speaker, he is right. Why would one accept it? Yes, the Conservatives have concluded an agreement in principle and have a lot of details about it, but they do not have anybody's signature on it from the other side of the ocean yet. They have to go through that.
There are a bunch of governments that are going to have new elections. In fact, I had the great honour of being in Ukraine when it elected its new parliament. There are others. Ukraine is not in the EU, but many of us on both sides of the House are hopeful that that will happen. I would like to thank my colleagues on the other side who accompanied me on that mission.
There are other things to do with this yet. We have clearly outlined in committee, in good faith, why we do not accept this. We put a report together that does not show dissent but how we think we can improve it and in which we added a couple of recommendations of our own. Of course, the government did not respond to them, which was really disappointing. It would have been nice if it had responded to our recommendations, though I realize it did not have to do so. In my view, the recommendations were not offensive but were there to try to augment the report. That is why we do a supplementary report.
Clearly, we await the debate on CETA and the implementation language. As mentioned earlier, we do not debate trade here but debate enabling legislation. The debate comes after that. Let us be honest and admit that it does. We do not actually do that, but we sneak it in sometimes. When the legislation comes forward, it is not about the different viewpoints and how we do trade, but about whether we want it or not, and here is the deal. The Speaker allows us to go around it a bit and do that sort of stuff, but the bottom line is that we do not actually have that debate.
The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons was absolutely right when he talked about being a younger man at university and remembering the great debate in the eighties on the first free trade agreement. That really was a debate about free trade and what groups wanted this or that. It was the last time that such a debate happened. He was absolutely on the money when he said that. It was the last time, but the Conservative government is responsible for that because it does not bring trade agreements here to talk about trade. It brings them here to enable what the government has already decided to do.
Perhaps the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons should read his own remarks in Hansard tomorrow and find out if maybe he wants to have the policy discussion here, instead of enabling legislation and simply having a “yes” or “no”, “up” or “down” vote. Perhaps the House leader of the government would take a look at Hansard and decide to do something different in the future.