Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Calgary Forest Lawn.
This deal has definitely been a rocky road for Canada. It has created a lot of tension, although “stress” may be a better word, for a lot of Canadians and Canadian businesses. In light of working with a president who was threatening to rip up NAFTA and with all sorts of other issues going on in the U.S. and the U.S. election, it definitely caught Canadians' attention these last four years. It is very important that we now talk about the rest of the story, how we have ended up where we are today and why we ended up being a target instead of having a deal that would make North America more competitive in the world marketplace.
Two and a half years ago, the Prime Minister volunteered to renegotiate NAFTA, and that is fine. What was not clear was what his goal was. In his mind, I do not think he had a clear goal. I do not think he had a clear idea of what he wanted the outcome to look like, and that caused a lot of stress and failures as the negotiations progressed.
We could look at the new NAFTA as a chance to make North America more competitive, to create an environment throughout North America and take advantage of all the strengths that Mexico, the U.S. and Canada have to offer, putting them together and competing strongly in the world marketplace. We had that opportunity and we lost it. That is frustrating for Canadian businesses and it is frustrating for businesses right across North America because it was there and we did not achieve it.
Mexico calls it NAFTA 0.8. We call it NAFTA 0.5. The reality is this is not a good agreement. It is okay; it stinks, but the business community says it would rather take a bad agreement in this case than have no agreement, to have it ripped up and have nothing. After all, the U.S. is 70% of our business and we do some $2 billion in trade every day with the U.S. The reality is that we ended up with an agreement that the U.S. and Mexico negotiated and Canada signed onto afterward. How did that happen?
I will talk about the inside baseball going on in D.C. while this was going on. When I went to D.C. the first time after the Trump election, I and the former leader of the Conservative Party, Rona Ambrose, visited Congress and very quickly we realized a couple of things. The first was that Canada was not the target in these deals. Members of the House of Representatives and Senate said they had problems with Mexico. We told them that if they were renegotiating NAFTA, they were also renegotiating with Canada. They said, “We have no issues with Canada. That is crazy.” They did not even understand the relationship between Canada and the U.S. They did not understand how important that relationship is and how much business is done.
The former Conservative leader and I said we needed to help them on this deal because if they did not get this right, it would cost us a lot of jobs and our economy would suffer substantially. We worked closely with the Liberal Party. There is no question about it. We did not deny it. I did round tables right across Canada and spoke to Canadian businesses about what they wanted out of the agreement. The committee sat in the summer to give the minister a chance to talk about what she thought the agreement could look like when it was completed, and she did not. She sent some virtue-signalling ideas of what she would like to include in the agreement, ideas the Liberals knew the U.S. president would never accept, ideas that really did not do anything for competitiveness in Canada, but that was their starting point. We knew right then that we were in trouble.
I will admit that members of the House from all parties worked very well together on this agreement. Whether it was the trade committee or the Canada-U.S. group, they worked well together. Where did it fall down? Where it fell down is very serious and shows how problematic things can get. It fell down in the PMO and the minister's office. Members did a great job educating members in the U.S. at the state level and the federal level on the importance of our relationship. When we go to the U.S., they quote our numbers back to us on how important that relationship is. How did it end up that Canada became the target instead of Mexico?
During Trump's speeches in the U.S. during the election campaign, what did he talk about? He talked about building a wall. He said NAFTA was horrible and Mexico took all of the jobs. He said that trade with China is horrible and China took all the jobs. He said that the U.S. lost all their jobs. The only thing he mentioned about Canada was a bit about dairy. He wanted access to dairy into Canada. He did not like the fact that our dairy producers are profitable and the U.S. dairy producers were in a system that did not allow them to become profitable. In reality, they did not want to ship milk to Canada; they wanted the price that Canadians had for their milk in Ohio.
What changed? I can remember sitting down with Secretary Ross, who said, “Canada and the U.S., everything is good here. In fact, there should be some changes here, maybe in the buy America provisions to include Canada like the 51st state.” I remember him saying, “We should also do a trade deal together with Japan.”
We were invited to the table to go to Japan, if we wanted to choose that. We chose the TPP route, which I think is a better route. However, it shows how good the relationship was at that point and where it has ended up today. It comes back to how the PMO and the minister handled the relationship with the President of the United States.
We said very publicly that the Prime Minister did not need to be his best friend, but he should not poke him. I said, “Do not poke him.” Making a speech in New York, in his backyard, criticizing the president is not a wise thing. It might get the Prime Minister on Saturday Night Live and all the left-wing media in the U.S. would love him for it, and the Prime Minister would enjoy himself because he is popular with the left-wing media in the U.S., but at what expense? Canadian jobs.
After the Montreal summit, what did the comments the Prime Minister made about the president do? It led to the aluminum and steel tariffs. On those types of things, he could not help himself. He wanted to be a popular prime minister in the U.S. I needed a functional prime minister here in Canada, not a populist in the U.S.
With the minister, it was the same thing. Some of her articles in the U.S. were insulting to the president. Why would she do that in the middle of negotiations with our biggest trading partner?
Mr. Speaker, how would you feel if I insulted you right now? Would you cut me off and tell me to sit down, or would you let me keep going?
That is what they were doing down there. That is what the Prime Minister and the minister were doing in the U.S. That is what was creating the problems we have here today. That is how we ended up with NAFTA 0.5.
We would go down and actually build a strong relationship between the White House and Parliament, and they would destroy it over and over again. I am sure our ambassador down there must have been pulling out his hair, because some of the directions he was given to lobby on behalf of Canada were definitely anti-Trump or anti-Republican sentiments. Why would they do that in the middle of negotiations of our biggest trade deal? Why? It is just amazing.
We saw that over and over again. That part of the story needs to be told here in Canada so that Canadians understand when we start losing jobs, so that Canadians understand why we gave up market access, and so that Canadians understand why we cannot expand another auto plant in Canada. It is not because we were the target at the start. It is because of the actions of these offices that created that problematic situation.
We are going to support this deal. As I said, in this case a bad deal is better than no deal. Too many jobs are at stake.
It is going to be interesting to watch this. As we watch the outcome and what is going on with Mexico and the U.S., and the battles they are having amongst themselves, it will be interesting to see if our Prime Minister can actually stay out of it. It will be interesting to see how the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, moves forward with legislation, and how we are going to handle that. Even though we think we have an agreement, and we have signed an agreement, until the Democrats put it through the House ways and means committee, we really do not have a 100% final agreement. I think it is important that we do that in sync with them. That is the route the committee is looking at.
It did not have to be this way, if we had approached this in the right way with the president. When he said he had labour issues in Mexico, we could have said that we have labour issues in Mexico. When the president said he had steel being dumped from China, we could have said we have steel being dumped from China. Canada had a lot of the same issues the president was talking about during his campaign. We are not building a wall. We are not doing those crazy things. We do not need to. Mexico has been a good trading partner and a good friend. However, the reality is there were opportunities to build upon the same concerns the U.S. had, and to actually produce an agreement that would have made us even more competitive internationally.
Another failure in this agreement has to be on softwood lumber. Canadians have to see that. The reality is there are lots of things in this agreement that we need to fix.
On October 21, Canadians are going to change their government, and we are going to have the responsibility, again, of fixing all the discrepancies that the Liberals have left on the table. We will fix them. We will go back to the U.S. We will do it in a positive and approachable manner, and we will deal with them issue by issue. A government led by the Leader of the Opposition will fix these things. Canadians can take comfort in knowing that.
In the meantime, this agreement will pass and hopefully will be ratified because, as I said, the instability created by not having an agreement is far worse than what we have right now.