Madam Speaker, I will note for the benefit of the member that the U.S. is not a member of the bank and that the Obama administration raised concerns about transparency and human rights. This highlights a fundamental difference in the foreign policy approach taken by the government and the official opposition.
The question they want us to ask is, what is everyone else doing, so we can do it too. The question we want to ask is, what is right in terms of our values, and what reflects our national, strategic, and economic interests? On both of these scores it is very clear that this proposal fails.
The parliamentary secretary spoke about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the World Bank in the same breath, but we have to take a critical approach and look at the differences between these vehicles. One is transparent and seeks to have human rights protections in place, and one transparently does not. It is simply not enough for the government to try to create some kind of equivalence between the values advanced by a PRC-controlled institution and those advanced by a western institution. We should not buy into a false moral equivalency between the kinds of systems that exist or are propagated by these strategic vehicles.