Mr. Speaker, it will not surprise members to hear that I do not share my colleague's characterization of things. The reality, of course, is that when we were in government, the trade deals that came before the House were obviously ones that we supported because we negotiated them. In all of those trade deals, we had naysayers who said that we could not possibly get a good deal for Canada, that we could not possibly preserve certain aspects of our domestic policy environment, and yet we were able to sign good deals for Canada.
Why did we support those deals? It is because they were good deals that we negotiated. Under the Conservatives, we were hard-nosed negotiators. We got good deals done for Canada.
Certainly, in a number of cases, we see the new Liberal government continuing with deals that were partially, or in the case of CETA, completely negotiated by the previous government. We see that as a positive. Again, obviously, members could expect us to support those deals.
In terms of the NDP's position on this, its members are sounding more and more like Donald Trump every day. They are saying they are okay with one-off bilateral trade deals, but that big multilateral trade deals, whoa, are a little too huge for them.
The reality is that multilateral trade involving multiple countries provides a great deal of economic benefit for our country. Obviously, there are certain cases in which moving forward with a bilateral trade deal, in this case with Ukraine, makes sense. However, that does not mean that we should be reluctant to sign trade deals with larger groups of countries, especially in the case of Europe, where it is not possible to proceed with individual, bilateral trade deals with one European country here or there if they are part of the EU. There is a need to negotiate on a multilateral basis.
However, this is good trade deal, and CETA is a good trade deal. Again, when the Conservatives were in government, they had a progressive, positive trade deals, but also effectively negotiated in the interests of Canada to get things done that maybe naysayers said were not possible, but that we were able to get done.