Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to join the debate on Bill C-30, an act implementing our latest free trade agreement with the European Union. I was very glad to hear the minister speak on the subject. I congratulate him as well on his appointment to the ministry. For all those who did not make it, their time will come I am sure, when the minister faces tough questions and will be unable to answer them in the House.
As I have done before, I have a Yiddish proverb, and I love using them. “Words must be weighed, not counted”. I know when it comes to counting words in the House, two members will disagree with me that they should be weighed. The member for Winnipeg North and my dear colleague, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, might disagree with me in their race to the top. However, weighing the words is far more important.
I know many members have come to the House to talk about the details of the bill, the different sections they agree with or agree less with, and the impact it will have on Canada's economy. I want to take it back just a little to talk about the meaning of free trade, the meaning it has had for Canada, and the impact it has had on our history.
Canada has been a trading nation from the very beginning, since pre-Confederation, by our forefathers and those who came here early on when beaver pelts were considered the currency of our country.
In the earliest debates on Confederation at the time, when Canada was founded, there were great debates on how Canada would become a true country. They were about the maritime customs union. That is what the early pre-Confederation politicians of the day were debating. It took Sir John A. Macdonald, taking charge of the situation and hijacking these meetings, to turn it into a discussion about how they could form Canada, a country devoted to trading, both within the British Empire and with our neighbours to the south. From that moment on, the great debates in our country have truly been about how we can make free trade work for us.
At the time, those debates were called reciprocity. The reciprocity treaty had been annulled the year before, in 1866, and that was the great foundation of our country. That impulse that we no longer could trade as easily with the United States, formed a great need among politicians to come together, create Canada and be able to trade more openly with our British motherland, the great mother parliament.
It was Alexander Mackenzie, the second prime minister of Canada, a great Liberal prime minister, a great believer in free trade, who said that reciprocity was really what Canada was all about. It was very important to him and to his party that it be implemented and returned to what it was.
As I mentioned, it has been a foundational debate in Canada: how and with whom can we trade, and as freely as possible. It has never been about how the government can trade with another government, but how people can trade. People create corporations and enterprises. They are entrepreneurial. They look for the best deals, and it is not just about price. It is about the product people want. It is about obtaining the type of product and not looking at only the price, but the quality, its origins, whatever country it comes from, and being able to obtain it freely in a country without government interference telling them, through a tariff or regulation, or imposition of a ban, they cannot obtain it.
In a previous decade, it was a Conservative government that negotiated many free trade agreements, with 46 different countries, which brought the total up to 51 in Canada. That was 4.6 agreements per year.
Sometimes when I speak with students, especially students of history, I like comparing Canada to the Hanseatic League. It is in ancient Europe. We are about to embark on a great free trade agreement with Europe, including many of the countries whose cities were formerly with the Hanseatic League of ancient Europe. Canada is on the cusp of achieving a vast free trade empire, of which Prime Minister Harper used to speak. We have this great opportunity. Free trade will reshape our country and Europe as well. It is that combination of sharing a common history and common culture for many of us. It is an opportunity to shape the future for the next 20 to 50 years. It is not just for ourselves. It is also for our children and grandchildren, who will have opportunities that we did not have when we were much younger.
Other agreements have gone onto the wayside, like the TPP. It is my great hope the government will take up the TPP negotiations again and ensure we sign it with the partners that are still willing to go ahead with it. It is a great loss for the United States not to be moving ahead with the TPP at this time. I still have great hopes that Congress will change its mind and actually move on this. Again, it puts Canada right in the middle between CETA and the TPP and our free trade agreement with the United States.
We have an amazing opportunity to become the hub country through which goods can move, corporations can come and not just create good paying middle-class jobs, but also reshape our country and provide new opportunities and new ways of doing business, and creating wealth for the government to tax and pay for the public services Canadians have come to expect.
While TPP is a great loss for the United States, CETA is a great loss for the United Kingdom. A great many politicians in Europe and the United Kingdom have said this will be a be a loss for the United Kingdom, but they still look forward to negotiating free trade agreements both in Continental Europe and Canada, and finding opportunities to increase trade and to make it possible.
I like to quote from Daniel Hannan, a politician. Sometimes I also look at his videos and his speeches. He is now a former member of the European parliament, and was one of the big promoters of Brexit. He said that the union between the United Kingdom and the European Union was not some great utopia of free trade due to the regulations that were imposed on them. He said that the goal of a great many politicians in the United Kingdom still was to achieve free trade with Europe, Canada and with as many countries as possible to give this great opportunity for their citizens to trade freely with others. It is still good to aim high as much as possible. I am glad the government is pushing forward the legislation to implement the treaty and then to move on from there to other negotiations, to other perspective countries and regions with which we could achieve some type of free trade agreement and provide opportunities for Canadians to trade.
On January 24, The European Union trade committee voted 25 to15 with one abstention. The rapporteur for the CETA said that this was a strong response to growing protectionism and that trade would enable them to continue to bring wealth to both shores of this trans-Atlantic friendship. That is a great way of looking at it. It is not just about the business component. It is also about this great friendship we have had, which predates NATO and the British and French influence on this continent. It is a long-standing relationship that America in the very broad sense, America, Canada, Mexico., has been able to enjoy with Europe. We have a shared history. Our histories and politics are intertwined. We participate in international bodies together. Although we can disagree, and sometimes very profoundly, we maintain that friendship, and that agreement does not turn into rancour, warring among each other anymore, thankfully. Now we have an opportunity, through free trade, to mutually reach an agreement between ourselves that will be beneficial for our citizens and our residents.
Both Canada and the European Union recognize in the deal the right to regulate domestic rights, and both will remain intact. That is found in section 7(d) of the legislation. This should allay the concerns that multinationals will somehow gain more influence and be able to pit one government against another, or pit a regulation in order to try to indicate that it is unnecessarily targeting them in some way. Section 7(d) tries to allay some of the fears of some people who no longer support free trade, the great pull internationally toward more protectionism that we saw 100 years ago. We need to push against that. It is a good sign from the Liberal government that it is moving ahead with the European free trade agreement. It says that we are open for trade and business. We want to find ways to trade more freely with others. We want to reach an agreement to reduce tariffs, to align our regulations to give those opportunities to Canadians to trade freely with them.
CETA will not remove barriers on four specific areas: public services, audiovisual, transport services, and a few agricultural products, including dairy, poultry, and eggs. The European Union expects the trade between its bloc and our country to rise by 20% when the agreement is fully implemented.
If we look at some of the numbers from 2015, according to the European Union, if we count just the imports from Canada, they totalled just about $40 billion. If we look at the exports to Canada, it was $49.5 billion. This is just a rough conversion from the euro.
We could also look at the Observatory of Economic Complexity, which is a website I highly recommend to people interested not only in numbers but to have them visually explained, to visually show what the numbers actually mean in real trade and to convey the numbers in a way that is catchy and attractive to the eye. For Canada, if we have a rough comparator, it means in value.
We exported $45.2 billion in cars in 2014. If we compare that to the exports we got from Europe, it was $49.5 billion. Therefore, we can see the opportunity we have. The car industry in Canada is a sector of the economy. It is very big in Ontario and not so very big in Alberta, but it is an opportunity if we just compare these two numbers. The top imports to Canada were vehicle parts, $20.4 billion, which is about twice as much as our EU trade; refined petroleum was $17.9 billion; and delivery trucks were $12.7 billion. Again, we expected the boost to Canadian trade would be somewhere in the area of $12 billion. Therefore, that boost alone would be like doubling the delivery trucks we import.
Again, it would be like almost doubling the vehicle parts sector of our economy. It is a huge opportunity, a chance for Canadians and Canadian companies to find ways to meet the needs and wants of people overseas and, likewise, for those people in other countries, such as the European Union, to find ways to meet the needs of Canadians without having the government necessarily interfere in that free exchange of goods and services.
The 751-seat European Parliament will be holding a vote on February 15. Therefore, it is very timely to be having this debate and passing the bill. It would be a good signal to send to the European Parliament that we are onside and that we want to proceed as quickly as possible to pass this bill in both the House and the Senate so Canadians can start to do the legwork needed on the ground to prepare themselves to trade with our partners in Europe. I am sure European companies and European residents are getting ready to trade with Canadians.
Sending the message that we still believe in free trade is more important today than it has ever been before. As I mentioned before, there is a great rise in protectionism across the globe. A great many people have seen, for the past 30 years potentially, in their own individual cases the lack of opportunity. They have not been able to obtain the jobs they wanted. The free trade in their countries perhaps was not as successful as they had hoped, or the sector of the economy they were in, perhaps for extended periods of time, suffered from an agreement where someone else with a comparative advantage was able to trade at a lower price or for different quality goods.
Again, we are always trying to find opportunities to help Canadians retrain and find new sectors of their economy to go into, to find entrepreneurial routes to create wealth. Although there are those situations, we have to support this renewal through this agreement, this renewal of our faith in free trade that it is good for Canadians and that it has been part of our history. We can broaden this transatlantic friendship and with that, protectionist sentiment notwithstanding, we will make this work. It will not be perfect. Every sector of the economy may not profit as equally as another, but we will find opportunities to make it work. Where it does not work, we can always make an agreement with our European partners to get it done.
I will go back to my example of the Hanseatic League. That league was based on trade in Europe, especially around the Baltic Sea. It dominated trade for almost 400 years. Yet Hansa societies were working to remove restrictions on trade, especially regulatory restrictions on trade. Permitting and restrictions were a big deal in those countries, in those cities. It was very difficult at the time to freely trade among all regions there. The Hanseatic League, basically, made it possible to trade freely almost among themselves, to provide and ship goods to other areas that needed them.
The opportunities that the league found profoundly reshaped the Baltic states and cities. We can still see it today in the city from which I come. I was born in Danzig, Gdansk in Polish. After 1466, it became the leading grain port and made Poland the dominant exporter of grain through the association it had with the league. I lived in that city for four and a half before my family came here in 1985. It is marked by that profound association it had with the Hanseatic League. The entire port areas are either shipyards or old grain ports. The most historic well-known heritage buildings are old Hansa society buildings. They are all grain storage facilities. Those are the things people mostly recognize.
Even though there was such awful destruction in World War I and World War II and during the many riots and uprisings in Poland during the 1800s during the partitions, those buildings still stand today. They stand as a kind of reminder to generations that have come afterward of the opportunities trade has given cities like Danzig and cities like Hamburg, which greatly profited from the ability to associate with others freely and to trade freely with them.
I am convinced that CETA will reshape Europe and Canada for decades to come in a positive way, a better way. We will find opportunities to trade and will find, perhaps, wants and needs that we did not know existed in Europe. Likewise, they will do it here. We will grow that relationship we have with them, both in trade imports and exports but also in the friendship we enjoy. We will come to a better understanding of what our countries require or do not require. People perhaps will be able to move across to other areas of the world, again seeking opportunities, chances to create wealth for themselves and for their families to live, work, and play as they wish.
The freedom to associate has to also mean the freedom to trade. “Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which government can confer on its people, is in...every country unpopular”. Perhaps members think that was said in 2017, but it was not. It was actually said in 1824, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the first Baron Macaulay, a British historian and politician, a Whig, no less. At the time, he was looking at continental Europe and saying that he saw a great rise in protectionism and a great rise in people no longer seeing the benefits of free trade and the opportunities they received from engaging in trade with others.
Again, it is the great paradox of our time that those who have gained the most from the liberalization of trade, especially since 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, no longer believe in its ability to reduce extreme poverty. They no longer believe in its ability to reduce extreme deprivation in housing and energy. They no longer believe that it is as effective. We know that all the stats prove it. We can see with our eyes, when we travel to certain areas, that trade has benefited immensely countries in Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America. Things are better today than they were 100 years ago or 50 years ago. Since 1989, countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Poland have immensely benefited, and their middle class has benefited, from the ability to trade freely with others, and so have we.
The trade relationship we have with the United States is the one we know best. It is the one sometimes we take for granted as well. We do not do enough to nurture the relationship we have with our American friends to the south. Sometimes we take it for granted, and we should not, because just as Baron Macaulay said in 1824, the rise of protectionism can always return. We are seeing that today.
What we have to be doing with an agreement like this is passing it as quickly as possible through this House, with judicious debate here and in the Senate. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to at least move it along further so that when the European Parliament, on February 15, has its vote, it will see that Canada is ready to take advantage of this agreement we have negotiated in good faith with the European Union and that we want to follow through on it and deepen the relationship we have had.
The great reductions in poverty and deprivation we have experienced and seen with our own eyes over the past 60 years were not the result of status or socialist command economies. They did not lift more than a billion people out of poverty. It was free trade, free-market economies that succeeded.
Why are people opposed to it today? I will maybe leave off with a quote from Daniel Hannan. He mentions two things that are the problem between protectionism and free trade and the pull between the two: “dispersed gains, concentrated losses”.
We can see that in industries that are protected, that enjoy some type of grant from the government, a monopoly or oligopoly system, such as in sugar and tires. It goes on and on.
On one side, the gains of free trade are dispersed across the population, and it is hard to say, “This is why I have gained over the past 20 years and have been able to obtain a job that feeds my family and gives me the sense of hope and opportunity I have always looked for”. On the other side, concentrated losses, those who lose from it can sometimes lose very profoundly.
My family came to Canada not just because they were fleeing political persecution but because of the opportunities Canada provided. The free trade agreement is deeply embedded in that, and I urge the House to pass this bill as soon as possible.