Madam Speaker, it is the position of the New Democrats that we will be supporting this agreement at second reading, so that we can advance this agreement to committee where we can work on what we consider to be some of the shortcomings of this bill.
My hon. colleague is quite right that there are some very positive provisions in this agreement, including some novel and innovative chapters on gender, the environment and labour, as I pointed out in my speech.
Again, the fundamental problem with this bill, though, is that it still fails to distinguish between products and services that are made on the West Bank, that are made in occupied territories. If those products and services are permitted to be passed off as products and services from the State of Israel, then what we are doing is we are violating our own Canadian policy, which is that we do not recognize the occupation of those lands to be legitimate. We view those as part of sovereign Palestinian territory.
In that respect, by passing this bill without having those sections amended or cured, we run the risk of actually deepening the intractable problem between these parties instead of helping. That is something that New Democrats do not wish to do. We wish to use trade policy as a means to improve humanitarian, human rights, environmental, labour, and corporate and commercial conditions in the world. That is what we will be working to do at committee.