Mr. Speaker, I will do that, although I would ask you to help ensure more collegial behaviour on all sides of the House.
I suspect that the members on the other side of the House will not doubt the credibility or the significance of a report from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, one of our country's leading industry bodies. In May 2014, it published a report called “Turning it Around: How to Restore Canada's Trade Success”. That title should worry us. It does not sound like it is too great a verdict.
The first chapter is called “Canada's Lagging Trade Performance”. Here is what it says:
International trade is one of the fastest and most effective ways for Canadian businesses to grow, create jobs and contribute to the economy. However, the increase in exports and outward investment has been slow in recent years, and diversification to emerging economies has been limited.
...Canada is lagging its peers according to several measures. Over the past decade, the value of exports has increased at only a modest pace.... If...price increases [in energy] are excluded, the volume of merchandise exports shipped in 2012 was actually five per cent lower than in 2000 despite a 57 per cent increase in trade worldwide.
For a party like the Liberal Party, which believes strongly in middle-class prosperity and in trade as a path toward that, these are damning words indeed.
According to the report:
Canada’s foreign investment trends tell a similar story. Export Development Canada has recorded significant growth in sales by Canadian foreign affiliates...but evidence suggests that sales levels are relatively higher for affiliates from the U.S., the U.K., Japan and Australia.
Not only are we doing less well than we did in 2000, despite a robustly globalizing world economy, we are lagging our international peers. This is why the Liberal Party believes so strongly in trade and why we would really like to see Canadian policy, Canadian action, that is not just about slogans, not just about photo ops, but is actually about a strategic approach and getting deals done.
That brings me to a deal we have been speaking about quite a lot this week, which is the European trade deal. In October, our Prime Minister, with great fanfare and at some expense, travelled to Brussels to sign an agreement in principle on the European trade deal. I am very sad to report that unfortunately, that deal has not yet been concluded, despite the fact that the Prime Minister has travelled again this week to Brussels, which would have been a great opportunity to conclude that very important deal.
I have more worrying news still to report. We requested from the government the actual documents the Prime Minister signed. We can see the Prime Minister signing it if we look at video of that October 18 event. Here was the response we had from the PCO:
A thorough search of the records under the control of the PCO was carried out on your behalf; however, no records relevant to your request were found.
We would like to hear at some point what the Prime Minister actually signed and what is happening with that deal. We believe the Honduras free trade deal is important, but obviously the European free trade deal is much more important.
In conclusion, we believe absolutely that particularly today, in 2014, in the age of globalization, in the age when technology has truly flattened the world economy, Canada has no choice but to be an energetically and strategically trading nation. That is our path to prosperity for our own middle class, and if we do it right and we do it with pure hearts, as well as with smart brains, we can use trade to be a real way of encouraging the growth of democracy in civil society around the world.
However, I am very sad to say that today in our trade agenda we see Canada falling behind. As the Canadian Chamber of Commerce itself concluded just last month, we have a lagging trade performance. I submit that it is because we are focusing far too much on photo ops, which may have been without an actual document signed. We would love to hear more about that.
We have much less of a clear strategy focusing on big trading partners and on the big places of growth in the world, and much less effective follow-through. We would love to see much more focus on Africa, for example.
Here is what Canada needs: a truly strategic global trade policy, a policy that is about world strategy and fitting Canada into the global economy, a policy that always remembers that we cannot be an effective trading nation without putting our values first, and finally, a trade policy that is not just about photo ops but is about actually getting the deal done.