Mr. Speaker, I have great respect for the hon. member and I take his questions at face value.
The Liberal Party has its own contradictory past. I think Liberals campaigned against the free trade agreement in 1988. In 1993, they had a little red book that said they were going to renegotiate NAFTA. They never did that. That is par for the Liberal Party, which says one thing at election time and does another when it is elected. What is the Liberal Party's record on trade? I am not sure.
The hon. member is a little disingenuous. He knows for a fact that the New Democrats supported the trade deal with Jordan. Whether there was a standing vote or whether it was passed by division, the member, as a member of this House, knows it is irrelevant.
The question of who we should be engaging is a straw man argument. This Conservative argument—and I am surprised to hear a Liberal making it—is that if it is a really terrible country, we should engage with it. If that is the case, we should be signing a free trade agreement with Iran or North Korea. They have terrible human rights abuses. If engaging with those countries is the way to improve human rights, why not engage them? I do not hear anybody in those two parties suggesting that we sign a free trade agreement with those two countries.
It is because of this: when countries are so far outside of the international norm, when they are not conforming to even the basic standards of international behaviour, we should not be rewarding those countries.
When South Africa had apartheid, we did not sign a trade agreement with them to facilitate that regime. We brought in sanctions and boycotts. The government, and I will give it credit for it, has done that in Iran, when the country just refused to comply with basic norms of conduct.
I will just finish with this. This is what we heard in committee from a professor from York:
Trade and investment create economic benefits, but who ends up with those benefits? In Honduras the answer seems clear. It is now the country with the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America, and 43% of the labour force is working full time without receiving even the minimum wage. A study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington found that in the two years after the 2009 coup, over 100% of all real income gains went to the wealthiest 10% of Hondurans...
I will stop by saying:
The de facto regime soon embarked on policies that included using the army and police in actions against citizens exercising their right to protest. Numerous suspensions of the right to assembly and protest were put in place, all of them out of compliance with the requirements of Honduran law and its constitution. Protestors were shot, beaten, and some died in open conflict with the military or police.
That is the country that—