moved:
That, given the Prime Minister has weakened Canada’s international reputation during his disastrous trip to India and his capitulation to Donald Trump during NAFTA negotiations;
and given he continues to do so with his handling of the canola trade crisis with China;
the House call on the government to cancel its investment in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and immediately:
(a) appoint an ambassador to China;
(b) increase the cap and interest-free portion of the Advanced Payment Program; and
(c) launch a complaint at the World Trade Organization.
Madam Speaker, the Conservatives are very proud to bring this debate to the floor today because, as Canadians have seen in the last three years, and as our allies, trading partners, long-time friends, and emerging partners around the world have seen, the rhetoric of the Prime Minister may be that Canada is back, but the reality has been anything but. When John Manley, a former Liberal prime minister, says that Canada has never been so alone in the world, we know that Liberal foreign policy has brought us to our nadir in world influence.
This crisis with China, and particularly the crisis with our canola producers, has resulted in a billion dollars in losses already. While many of my caucus colleagues will speak to that, I want to speak to the wider foreign policy failures of the current Liberal government, which are particularly due to the Prime Minister.
This motion will recommend the following: that we send an ambassador to China right away, that we bring world trade movement on the canola issue, and that the Prime Minister take action. It has been three months since Canada has had an ambassador to China, and our citizens and exporters are at risk.
The Canadians who are watching this debate and have seen the crisis with China that began late last year know that Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are in prison with lights on 24-7, being questioned and abused. We know that Mr. Schellenberg and another Canadian yesterday had death sentences brought down on them. We know that thousands of Canadians have questions about travel to China, their visa status and their work status. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians in China, Hong Kong included, but there has been literally no action by the Prime Minister.
It is not just China. This is what Canadians need to know. The failure of the Prime Minister, on a foreign policy level, is truly astounding. Let us go through some of the countries.
There is China, of course. There is Saudi Arabia, where a mistranslated tweet in Arabic has led to fewer physicians in our teaching hospitals and millions of dollars lost by all major universities in Canada. That came from a tweet, the kind of Twitter diplomacy that even long-time diplomats criticize heavily.
I cannot go any further without mentioning the India state visit. Not only did that set our relationship back and result in tariffs being imposed on lentils by the Indian government, but our relationship with an emerging Commonwealth partner is at its lowest point. The Prime Minister's gaffe-prone trip, where he invited a former criminal who had tried to assassinate an Indian official, has been the subject matter of global international ridicule, but more importantly it has hurt an important and emerging relationship with a key power like India.
In the Philippines, a faux pas by the Prime Minister led to Bell Helicopter in Montreal losing a helicopter order just because he had fumbled another relationship.
With respect to Japan, we know that last week the Prime Minister embarrassed Prime Minister Abe by referring to Japan twice as China. This was not only embarrassing but really catastrophic, because we are already repairing a relationship with Japan after the Prime Minister stood up world leaders in Vietnam at the trans-Pacific partnership leaders' meeting for a meeting with a Facebook executive.
I wish I were joking, but when we have Japan, Australia and New Zealand, some of our closest allies, the latter two being in the Five Eyes, producing international headlines ridiculing the Prime Minister of Canada because of his conduct, we know how bad it is getting. It is not just happening with challenging countries whose values we do not share, such as China and Saudi Arabia; some of our closest allies are asking what has happened to Canada.
The list continues. We have the United Kingdom and Belgium, where the Prime Minister stood up the royal family. There is Italy, where the Prime Minister compared ISIS fighters returning to Canada to Italian immigrants returning to Montreal after the war.
I wish I were kidding, but the bumbling son of a former Prime Minister, for whom a lot of people cut some slack for these gaffes, is hurting our international reputation. He is hurting citizens and exporters. Taken together, it is probably the biggest failure of the current government.
Then, of course, there is the United States. Anyone would have known the new administration would be a challenge in renegotiating NAFTA, an agreement that Conservatives brought, where the U.S. and Canada had a trade agreement before Mexico was added. The virtue signalling of the Prime Minister by bringing in non-trade issues that were related to his own brand made it complicated to make deals on auto, softwood and agricultural products. In the end, Mexico secured a deal and Canada was told to take it or leave it.
I should say that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
Literally, there is almost no relationship on the world stage that has not been diminished as a result of the Prime Minister and the Liberal government. It has been noticed. A headline in the National Post was “Earth to Trudeau—Fidel Castro was a brutal dictator, not a benevolent, grizzled uncle”. Who wrote that? It was Michael Den Tandt, who was later offered a job by the Liberal government, much like James Cudmore after writing negative things about the Norman case. Mr. Den Tandt is planning to run in Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, where he will be resoundingly defeated by Afghan war veteran Alex Ruff, who is the Conservative candidate there.
Let us see what a former ambassador to China from Canada said about the Prime Minister's approach to China. The headline in The Globe and Mail was “Trudeau’s embrace of China exposes his naïveté”.