Mr. Speaker, it is an interesting time for the government with successive trade agreements in a row so that Canadians can compare one to the other. Even though they are with different regions of the world, one with Europe, one with the United States and one with the Asia-Pacific region, Canadians can compare what the Liberals celebrate about one and ignore in another.
Let us take the most recent example of the United States agreement, the “new NAFTA”, as some are calling it. In there, the Liberals are lauding the fact that a certain provision called the “investor-state dispute provision”, which allows foreign companies to sue us while protecting them in an inordinate number of ways, was taken out of the “new NAFTA”. Donald Trump actually was the one who seems to have insisted upon it, yet the Liberals are wrapping their arms around that part of the trade agreement that is now gone and congratulating themselves as it was such a terrible aspect of the trade agreement.
One would imagine that there would be some sense of consistency by the Liberals that in other trade disputes the same mechanism would also not be present, because if it is good with the United States then, clearly, it must be something good with Asia or with Europe. However, that is not the case, never mind the fact that each time they sell one of these trade agreements to Canadians, they also have to compensate dairy farmers over and over again. The promises that are made are never fulfilled, as we have seen with CETA and the TPP. Farmers come back at the end saying the promises that were made for compensation are not there. Any time the government has to compensate a sector, that usually means one probably did not argue and negotiate to that sector's benefit. Thus, the government has to take taxpayer's money to compensate them.
I want to stay on the U.S. trade deal. The penalties against Canadian metals remains in place, and yet the Liberals are popping champagne corks.
Back to the CPTPP, if investor-state protections were so bad that the Liberals celebrated their annexation and their removal from the United States agreement, why did they leave them in place with so many more countries involved in this much larger trade agreement with Asia?