Mr. Speaker, the hog moratorium from the provincial NDP did have an impact, too. I will acknowledge that.
Having said that, there could have been more pork sales from Manitoba to Korea, but because countries like the U.S. beat Canada to it, because the Prime Minister made it such a low priority, many of my pork producers and manufacturers in Manitoba have lost out. This is because of the Conservative government and its inability to recognize the important value of having this as a higher priority.
That is the reason I put it into a question to a number of Conservative members who stood up. Before they start patting themselves on the back, they should fire back a reply email to the Prime Minister's Office and ask why they waited. Why did we take so long? How did we allow countries such as Chile and Peru, the European Union and the U.S. to beat us in coming up with a free trade agreement with South Korea? That is important.
What about trade as a whole? We want to talk about falling asleep at the switch in terms of one agreement. Imagine, if members will, a graph. Under that graph, we have Jean Chrétien and the Liberals and Paul Martin and the Liberals for 13 years. We have this graph at zero, where we have a trade surplus on the top of that graph. That is where will find Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and the Liberal governments during the 1990s and all the way up. That is when we had the trade surpluses.
What do members think happened when the current Prime Minister took office? It is a sad story. It plummeted down. We went below that centre point and we have had a huge trade deficit. The Conservatives took a surplus in trade and turned it into a deficit.
What does that mean for the middle class today in Canada? It means that thousands upon thousands of jobs have been lost because the Conservative government did not understand the file on trade. It might like to talk about trade as if it is the great champion of trade, but if we take a look at the facts, they will clearly demonstrate that there is only one party in the House of Commons that understands international trade, and that is the Liberal Party.
The sooner the Conservatives realize that, the sooner they should be coming over to us and asking for good ideas, and starting to act on our ideas. That will result in more trade.
I will be able to continue tomorrow.