Mr. Speaker, while listening to the hon. member's speech, I heard him make a suggestion that these were pious pronouncements by members opposite, and of course I was the one who was just speaking prior to that. I do take some offence to his thoughts that we would be thinking about this in a callous way.
I would like to talk a bit about the NDP trade critic being quoted in Huffington Post as saying that Honduras, along with Colombia, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Panama are “...not key economies with any kind of strategic value for Canada”. There was no discussion about human rights; just “no strategic value for Canada”.
The NDP member for British Columbia Southern Interior has written that “trade agreements threaten the very existence of our nation”. There was no discussion about human rights as far as Canada is concerned.
Then he mentioned that trade agreements are job destroying.
We look at those situations and then they stand and say that they are the defenders of human rights and as long as we have the kind of country that has our unions with labour and everything else, that is what is important and then we can talk about it.
I just wonder how Canadian businesses can be protected from the anti-trade rhetoric.