Madam Speaker, I will go back to a conversation I had with a third grader at Hickson elementary school a little while ago. He was asking about trade agreements. I told him to pretend he manufactured widgets, but he was only allowed to sell those widgets in Hickson. When I asked him what the population of Hickson was, he gave me a number, and I said that was only a couple of thousand people he would be able to sell to in a lifetime. I said to imagine if he had the ability to sell those widgets in Quesnel, Prince George, Williams Lake, Vanderhoof, and all the great communities in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George. He could sell thousands. I told him he would probably have to employ more people to build them, and he said that, yes, he would. Being able to open markets for our Canadian products is important.
I agree with our friends down the way that we should be doing everything to make sure that we are protecting jobs and the labour side of it, but we have to have access to those markets so that we can build our Canadian economy. We do not have enough within Canada, as we heard earlier, to live up to the high lifestyle that we as Canadians enjoy. We need to have access to other markets.