My vacation was not in Mexico, Mr. Speaker.
I am sure the House wants to hear about my experiences in Central America because it started a long time ago when I was farming. I was a vegetable farmer and I was asked to go to Panama to help the farmers there. It is so fitting for this topic. It was in the early 1990s when Noriega got the boot and Panama was going through a major transformation. It had a big army. Also the Americans were pulling out of the Panama Canal and passing it over to Panama, but they were also pulling out their U.S. base there. The country was going through a major transformation and the government needed help restructuring. It went from an army with hundreds of thousands of people with guns and all of a sudden it would have a small security force similar to Costa Rica. Therefore, how was Panama going to develop and evolve?
The Panamanian government approached me to help the farmers in the northern region, and at that time it was quite chaotic up there. Most of the people were running around with guns. It was an area that was great for growing vegetables, but people were growing crops for drugs. However, the Panamanian people and I worked together and we brought in technology. I saw the first elections happen there. We brought in technologies for irrigation and growing conditions.
We saw a transformation, and OAS played a part in that. Meanwhile many of us were helping the country on the resource side, but also a new governance structure was put in place. Right now Panama is one of the fastest-growing countries in the Americas and one of the main reasons is the OAS stepped in there and helped it with its new constitution. The Panamanian government had a big challenge. It had to take over the Panama Canal. It lost all the money from the U.S. base, but the government turned it around, and OAS played a big role.
I have been returning every few years to check up with the farmers to see how they are doing, and they are doing fantastically. They have greenhouses. They are growing vegetables for the whole of Central America. It is not because a Cape Breton farmer went down there and helped them. It is because of the structure of their country.
People could invest. Farmers knew if they invested in their land and equipment, it would not be taken away because the rule of governance was there.