Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of sending this bill to committee at this time.
One of the things I find really refreshing about this debate is that there is a certain amount of simplicity to this bill as compared to other types of trade measures that often come before the House. That is not to say that the bill could not stand to be improved. I think my hon. colleague from Vancouver Kingsway made some good suggestions as to how the committee might look at improving this bill.
For those Canadians listening at home, the object of the bill is relatively simple. It allows two things, in order to bring us into compliance with the TFA signed with the WTO. First of all, it would allow Health Canada to either send back or allow for the disposal of goods that come to Canada and do not meet certain health requirements. It would also allow the transit of goods across the country that may not be in compliance with standards that they would have to meet in order to stay here, but could be moved from coast to coast and then on to another destination.
These are the kinds of issues that it makes sense to talk about when we talk about trade, in trying to reduce barriers and trade-offs. That was part of what I think was driving that exchange initiated by the member for Vancouver Kingsway.
What is refreshing about it is that we see the government initiating a trade measure that does not, as we have seen so many times from Liberal and Conservative governments, sell out Canadian sovereignty in order to make life a little more convenient for foreign corporations. That is the kind of thing we are seeing with CETA and TPP.
It is really nice and refreshing for New Democrats, because New Democrats do support trade. We support reasonable measures to promote trade, but not having to have a debate about the nature of Canadian sovereignty and the ability of a democratically elected government in Canada to legislate to protect the environment and workers here. That is very nice. I wish we could do it more often in this place.
That is one of the reasons I am taking a certain delight in this debate, despite some Canadians who may be listening at home finding the debate kind of bland.
We are not talking about a trade deal, for instance, that would lock Canada into extra patent protection for large pharmaceutical companies that already have a 20-year life on their patents and would raise the costs of pharmaceutical drugs here. One of the reasons the NDP has been advocating for a national pharmaceutical plan, or a national pharmacare plan, has been to reduce the cost of drugs.
We do hear from the new Liberal government that it wants to reduce the cost of health care in ways that make more care more accessible to Canadians. However, instead of pursuing a national pharmacare program, we have seen it lending support to deals like CETA and the TPP that are going to do more to increase the cost of drugs for Canadians than whatever the government may do, short of signing a national pharmacare plan, to reduce those costs.
It would be a Pyrrhic victory for the government to bring in a national pharmacare plan—and I will be very pleased and also very surprised if that comes to pass in the term of the government—and then sign a deal like the TPP or CETA that would raises the cost of those drugs and nullify the benefit of the national pharmacare plan. If the effort to bring in such a plan just backfills the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, which are potentially going to receive less money under a pharmacare plan because the unit cost of drugs will go down, we are not obligated to sign a deal like the TPP just to put that money right back in their pockets. We are interested in the net gain for Canadian families, not for international pharma.
It is nice to talk about trade. We have heard the new Minister of Labour say that there has been a problem with the temporary foreign worker program, for instance, and that it has been abused. I would like to talk about how we reduce legitimate trade barriers without having to have a whole conversation about how we are going to create a shadow temporary foreign worker program that is hidden in an international trade deal with 12 other parties, a program that cannot be changed, when we know that even when the program was being administered only by the Canadian government, there were plenty of problems with it.
We were fortunate that the government was able to act unilaterally to try to curb some of the worst abuses of that program, a program that not only was making life difficult for Canadian workers who were then competing with temporary foreign workers but also making it hard for those temporary foreign workers who in many cases were being asked to pay obscene amounts of money in their home country just to get to a job, which when they came to Canada, was not what they were promised. Under threat of deportation by their employer, they had to put up substandard wages and substandard working conditions that were not part of the promised jobs.
That is not what it means to talk about reducing legitimate trade barriers. We should not have to conflate all of those issues together, and then be told that if we are opposed to enshrining a broken TFW program in an international trade deal, we are not in favour of trade.
We should not have to be told that, if we have a meaningful plan and believe in having affordable pharmaceutical drugs for Canadians, somehow we are anti-trade.
This is the kind of thing we should be talking about when we are talking about trade: trade-offs. Some may be reasonable, some may not. We may ultimately be in favour of some, and ultimately not others. It will be because we think that the trade-offs are, on balance, better for Canadians or, on balance, worse. However, the practice of successive Liberal and Conservative governments of ramming through a whole bunch of bad public policy and taking away the right of democratically elected governments in Canada to change those policies when they do not work and calling that a debate about simple trade is the dishonesty that needs to come to an end. At least we have been spared that dishonesty in this debate and, if nothing else, I am glad for that.