Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on such an important debate in the House. I thank my colleague for his intervention and his work on finance. It is very important for many reasons, but the depth of the file is very important to Canadians especially given what we are seeing here today.
I am currently diagnosed with red-green colour blindness, but I now can see quite clearly that I have red-blue colour blindness with regard to this chamber because what we are seeing is a continuation of policies. I give the former minister of trade credit for being very clear about his position on this, even though we disagree, and hence the motion coming forward today.
The Liberal position is clearly middle ground, trying to reach but making no sense considering what is happening right now. I would like to thank the member for Essex in particular. She has been travelling this country with the trade committee. It is interesting to hear a parliamentary secretary or a minister talk about using a committee as a vehicle or a reason to take action and later on talk about how committees are their own masters in deciding what they want to do independently. Again, it is the suck and blow type of approach the Liberals have on this type of issue. They use it for benefit at one point, and later on when it becomes a problem for them, they distance themselves from it.
As people listen to this debate the Liberal position is peculiar because they are saying they are having consultations across the country in different formats, whether it be meetings or the input coming in, but then they are here admittedly with an agreement that does not require or can never really have any real meaningful consultations right now because the agreement cannot be amended. In the first hour of debate we heard that.
Of particular concern to me and many Canadians because it is a significant employer, a value-added employer with innovation, which we are struggling to move forward in terms of developing the economy and having value-added jobs and services available, is that the auto industry is particularly at risk with this deal. In fact, this is so much so that when the deal was proposed, the auto industry was offered up as a sacrificial lamb for other types of industries, as in many other deals, despite the fact that in the trade agreement the vast majority of tariff issues do not exist with most of these countries.
The former minister of international trade talked very importantly about non-tariff barriers, which are critical to any trade agreement. We have seen that in the South Korea trade agreement with the United States, and now with the Canada and South Korea trade agreement, in regard to the auto industry. What is meant by non-tariff barriers is that, for example, in the auto industry tariffs go down to export into that country, but they make it more difficult to export into that country through regulations, other fees, and the difficulties supporting that import post-sale. It is a more difficult to set up dealerships. Importing parts and importing service standards are more difficult, all that becomes heightened. We end up with a consumer over there looking at a product that comes from Canada that competes on price and value, but if it cannot be fixed or serviced, that is a huge problem. That consumer will decide not to purchase that vehicle. Hence, the disaster that has been going on.
There were meetings in Windsor yesterday between the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Unifor. I thank the leadership of those organizations for hosting a round table, which included the Province of Ontario, as well as Mr. Tanguay, the auto czar for Ontario, that called again for a national strategy for the automotive sector. That is a common thing for manufacturing, to have that structure in place to support a national vision.
Ironically, the Liberals call for it, despite never implementing it when they controlled, or at least held government in many provinces. Their dysfunctional relationship with their provincial cousins is also more clear and evident with the TPP. They have dysfunctionality with the provincial cousins to the point of hostility, with Kathleen Wynne, the premier, expressing concerns about some of the auto sector and the agricultural issues around supply management.
We see it with Brad Duguid, another Ontario minister, who says:
We have concerns about the provisions in the agreement with regard to auto.... In particular, the provisions where tariffs will be reduced in Canada to zero in five years, and in the U.S. it’s 25 years.
That’s an unlevel playing field and we think the federal government failed to negotiate effectively on that measure.
What we are left with is that, despite the auto integration that we have with the United States, the continual struggle to keep that is so important for manufacturing. If one is not familiar with the auto sector, a vehicle could literally cross back and forth many times as it is being built to reach the final product, because we have that high level of integration. With that high level of integration, we have a lot of expertise and jobs to protect, because it is clearly important for retooling and future jobs.
How is it we have the importation of vehicles under NAFTA? We were talking about the three amigos summit previously. That is what the government was talking about and how important that is. We have Mexico, the United States, and Canada with pretty well an integrated automotive sector, but the United States gets 25 years in the same agreement of exemption on the auto industry and we get five.
Trade agreements are just that. We all support trade. We all do it from early ages to later on as adults. I remember that when I was trading a Gretzky rookie card, I knew not to get a Dave Semenko card. I have nothing against Dave Semenko; I am a goalie, so I like those kinds of players around me, especially when the crease gets hot. However, the reality is that there is a certain value on one versus the other. But that is what we got.
Imagine then that we have the international powerhouse of Malaysia versus Canada. Malaysia gets 12 years, more than twice that of Canada. It is insulting, coming from a city that helped found the auto industry with the Ford Motor Company and others, to have a country like Malaysia outmanoeuvre the then-Conservative government.
That is why a national auto strategy is important, because trade agreements affect all the investments that we make, whether it be labour investments, incentives, or tax reductions, all those policies and investments by all of us across Canada make a difference. What do we do with this? We undermine all those investments: training opportunities; people going to school, college, university; high-end development of a future; patent development; innovation that actually branches out beyond the auto industry. Look at Auto 21 in Windsor, where many of the auto manufacturing issues led to spinoffs to other patents in the development of technology. All of those things are put at risk for the great unknown.
The Liberals know there is a problem, because they talk about $1 billion to the auto industry for amelioration, but they have not said how or when and they have not put it in their budget.
The end consequence is this. We put at risk so much that we have publicly invested in as capital, training, in the future of innovation, and the manufacturing industry, without even a study, a peek, or a glimpse of the consequences, and we have been out-negotiated. There is no way around it.