Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleague with interest.
Evidence should be the basis of whether the trade deals as constructed by Liberals and Conservatives in the past are working out for Canadians. The member mentioned how her constituency is hurting and needs that sense of hope.
Through NAFTA and some of these other trade deals that have been invoked, the Canadian economy has actually lost just shy of half a million manufacturing jobs. As the member would well know, the announcement of a mere 1,000 or 500 manufacturing jobs in any one of our ridings would be a huge celebration because they are hard to get. It took two generations in fact to build up that manufacturing base in the country, and in my part of the world that includes things like sawmills and other added value to our natural resources. If that loss of jobs has been the result of the current trade deals that we have, the only argument the Liberals and Conservatives could possibly make is that things would have been worse somehow, yet that is not the case.
In this and many other trade deals, we simply ask the government to look solely through the lens of what the Canadian consumer and the Canadian worker need to see in the trade deals, and that is protection of Canadian interests. We see in this, from pharmaceuticals to milk marketing and all of the rest, a further degrading of the ability of Canadians to manufacture our goods and to add value to our natural wealth. I do not know why they continue down this same path when the evidence is so overwhelmingly bad.