Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to put some thoughts about this motion on the record. Like me, I think a lot of people in Elmwood—Transcona have the impression that we would like to move on from this whole India trip issue. However, there is a reason why it is hard to do that, and I will come to that.
We do not want to do that because the trip was a debacle from start to finish. It is frustrating for Canadians to see from the outside a trip where it appears that more thought and planning was put into the Prime Minister's outfits than was put into the meetings he was having over the course of his trip. It is frustrating when it appears that more thought went into who he was going to bring along to cook his meals than there was about who was going to be at political and diplomatic events.
That is the impression I think a lot of Canadians have of the trip. From what I can tell, it is a pretty fair impression. It is a frustrating thing. It would be nice to say that something came of the trip. The one concrete result that will have a direct result on Canadians is the fact that India's tariff on Canadian chickpeas went up to 60% within a matter of days of the Prime Minister leaving the country.
I can understand that the Liberals may feel this is a coincidence, because they obviously do not put a lot of thought and planning into their relationship with foreign governments, or the India trip would not have happened in the way it did. However, most governments do think about their actions, the consequences of those actions, the timing of their actions, their import, and the meaning that those will have for other countries in the world.
Therefore, it is hard to believe that a government that typically thinks about its actions, even though we may not always get that here, would just as a matter of coincidence have that significant of a raise in tariffs shortly after a visiting head of government, who it is obviously quite angry at. I do not think most governments are as flippant as this one in their interactions with other government. Therefore, I do not take that to be a coincidence at all. That was one consequence of the trip.
Then we were told that we are supposed to be really happy about the trip because it was great for trade. However, the trip itself had a $500 million trade deficit. The Liberals talked about $750 million' worth of investment being drummed up. I may not have all the numbers right on this, but I think the number was $750 million or it might have been a billion dollars.