Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise this afternoon to talk about the CPTPP.
I would like to recognize a few members of Parliament who made tremendous strides for our country on trade. There were a great number of people on the negotiating team, but certainly I would like to recognize our former prime minister, Stephen Harper, our former agriculture minister, Gerry Ritz, and of course, our former trade minister, who is still a member of Parliament. Those three individuals worked tirelessly to make sure we brought this deal home in 2015.
There are a tremendous number of trade deals that were accomplished from 2005 all the way to 2015. It was right in the midst of the election when the TPP agreement was signed. The beginnings of it date back a decade ago now. We entered into it in 2012. It is so important to have tariff reductions for our producers and to have access to 500 million people. It is tremendous.
In my area of Huron and Bruce County, we produce a lot of beef, pork and different commodities that will be cash crop commodities that will be sold in those different countries. The reduction in tariffs makes us very competitive against the United States, Brazil, Argentina and different countries that we compete with. No one can compete with us on quality and reliability with all those products, but those other countries are growing all those different commodities. We know in Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia, we will see a big uptick immediately when the deal is finally ratified. That will be great for our producers. It will be quite exceptional. There are other areas, such as manufacturing, etc. where there will be benefits, but in our area, it will be good.
The CPTPP truly looks like what one would expect a traditional trade deal to look like. There is give and take, but at the end of the day, all the countries are winners. We are really making progress on that front. I think back to the time that the chair of the Dairy Farmers of Canada said that supply management is set up for the next generation. That is a quote that goes back to the 2015 election, after the TPP deal was signed. It was a deal where we were able to make some concessions on our supply-managed front, to a point they could accept, but at the same time, pursue the interests of our non-supply-managed agricultural sectors and have tremendous gains.
Today, I called a few agricultural processors in my riding to see if they would like to make some comments on what they see is the future of this trans-Pacific partnership deal. They would not give me any comments. What did they want to talk about today? They wanted to talk about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. They were furious on a number of different fronts, and they were furious at the Prime Minister. I tried to get them to give me a quote on CPTPP and maybe throw me something on Japan, Vietnam or something they would see. They did not want to talk about that. In fact, they did give me a quote. It was a quote regarding the current Prime Minister, and I am sure I would be thrown out of the House if I used all the words one individual said to me.
They are furious. They are saying that trade deals are fine, that they are good and they will make good use of them, but the Prime Minister needs to wake up. He needs to realize the taxation disparity we now have between the United States and us. There are issues with red tape and bureaucracy in our country and they are going to continue to grow under the Prime Minister and the Liberal government. That is what they all wanted to talk about today.
Obviously, we will be supporting the CPTPP. However, on the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, I said to one person today that it got so bad in the negotiations that we could not even negotiate getting the “C” in front of the “M” in the name. One would have thought the Prime Minister could have at least gotten the “C” in front of the “M”.
There are buy America provisions, steel and aluminum tariffs, further IP protection, pharmaceuticals and concessions on supply management that it appears none of them are going to ever be happy with. I am waiting to hear from the rural members of Parliament on the Liberal benches, and there are a couple. I am waiting for them to stand up for their farmers.
The hard pill to swallow for farmers in the supply-managed sector is that they did not get anything. The government could have gone to them and said, “We had to make a few concessions, but look at what we got. We have more than we could ever imagine.” That did not happen. I know the Prime Minister has been asked about 27 times in question period to state one concession from the U.S. administration and his hair almost lights on fire because he cannot think of one. The negotiations went on for 13 months and we have nothing to show for it, except a really bad deal, because nothing was dealt with on buy America.
Wisconsin wanted access to Canada for its dairy farmers and yet it is one of the biggest buy American states in the United States. One would have thought the Prime Minister or one of the people on the trade team would have thought that maybe they could get a few percentage points on access for dairy and in return the others would have to take buy America out of the equation, or at least get something.
I would say the Liberals are lucky that Stephen Harper got this one to the finish line. However, the U.S. deal is your baby and you did not even get it to the one yard line in your own end.