Mr. Speaker, maybe I can start off by rebutting the facts.
One of the things that the member just stated is that he voted in favour of the Jordan agreement. I would again tell the member to look at the record. The New Democrats have never voted in their place in favour of a free trade agreement. This one is yet another piece of legislation on which we know the New Democrats will be voting against free trade.
I say that because there is a fundamental difference. We within the Liberal Party have been progressive in our attitudes toward recognizing the value of free trade and looking at ways in which we can allow for additional flow of goods and services because we believe that at the end of the day, thousands of jobs are created. The more Canada gets involved in global trade, the more the quality of lifestyle for all Canadians is improved. The numbers will clearly show that.
Indeed, we are a trading nation. We need and are dependent on world trade. That is what enables us to have the lifestyle we have today. It is what enables us to say that Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live in and, I would argue, as I am a bit biased, perhaps the best. Not to recognize the importance of trade is wrong. Although I should perhaps not give advice to my New Democratic colleagues, I think they are missing the boat on this.
When we look at the overall picture of trade and whether the government has done well or done poorly, what we find is that the government has not done all that well on the trade file, although it often talks about free trade agreements and says that it has done more trade agreements than the Liberal Party and so forth.
I like to keep things relatively simple, so let us look at overall trade. When the Conservatives took the reins of power a few years back, we had a huge multi-billion-dollar trade surplus. How does that compare with today, in the time since the Conservatives have been in government? It did not take long—only a matter of months, maybe a year—for them to turn that multi-billion-dollar annual trade surplus situation that Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin created into a massive trade deficit. We have been running deficits of billions of dollars on the trade file with the current government. I do not have the actual facts, but I would suggest that we probably have a larger trade deficit with the current government than with any other government in the history of Canada. I cannot say that for a fact, but I would not be surprised if that was the case.
What does that mean for the average middle-class family in Canada today? It means the loss of potentially tens of thousands of jobs that could be assisting in driving our economy forward. That is what it means in terms of the impact on our great country. This is where the government could have and should have given more attention.
We recognize that there is value to agreements of this nature. If we look back to the history of this particular trade agreement, we see that it dates back to 2001. There was Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Those were four countries back in 2001 for which there was recognition that we needed to advance and recognition that there was a potential to get into some trade agreements. It has taken the government a number of years to continue that process through and to ultimately achieve an agreement.
It should be no surprise that the Liberal Party is voting in favour of this agreement. No one should be surprised by that. There are changes we would have liked to have seen.
Our concern is the bigger picture. I will draw a comparison. During the 1990s, when I was an MLA, we had a huge trade mission. Team Canada went to Asia. Through the prime minister and that team approach, provinces, business leaders, and labour organization representatives were invited to participate in the team Canada approach to trade. The mission went to China, among other countries. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars of extra economic activity was created.
It took our Prime Minister quite a while to actually go to China, but when he did, the biggest announcement he had when he came back was that he was able to get a couple of panda bears to come to Canada. News flash to the Prime Minister: Manitoba had a couple of panda bears come to our province in the 1990s.
For the Liberals, it is not just the signature on a piece of paper saying that we are going to have a trade agreement. We recognize the value, and we want to see that take place, but it is overall trade. This is something we believe the government has failed in.
To what degree has the government been successful working south of our border, in the United States, where a good portion of our trade goes, and in many other countries around the world?
I feel very passionate about the Philippines, a country we in Canada are more dependent on in terms of immigration numbers than ever. Why do we not look at the possibility of entering into some sort of a trade agreement with a country like the Philippines, where we are growing in terms of the size of the population? There would be many benefits for both countries from expanding economic trade, tourism, and products and services. These are the types of things we should be hearing more about. I was glad that we had something in regard to Korea.
With respect to the Honduras trade agreement, we had a press release from the pork producers. Manitoba has a wonderful pork industry. I have had the opportunity to tour the farms on a Hutterite colony, where piglets are born and raised to a certain age and then brought to Brandon, where they are processed and packaged at Maple Leaf.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs in Manitoba alone. I believe that the plant in Brandon employs over 1,000 people. There are huge job numbers created in the pork industry in the province of Manitoba. They are good, quality jobs that are putting bread and butter on the table and providing a good quality of living for a lot of Manitobans.
With this particular agreement in place, it is expected that we will be able to do that much more in terms of the pork industry in Honduras. That is good for our province.
Let us not be fearful of free trade agreements, but let us make sure that we do our homework and deliver the best agreements we can. We should also go beyond trade agreements and start taking that team Canada-type approach of former Prime Minister Chrétien to bring Canadians to other countries to develop economic ties. By doing that, we will be creating thousands of jobs here in Canada.