Mr. Speaker, there is a transcript from a year ago, when I questioned the minister on Liberal delays on safeguards. I will send this package to the member from Toronto and to the rest of the Liberal caucus, because they have been asleep. How do I know that? None of them showed up to their own government's briefing on this bill last night. In fact, I found out about it when the Minister of Finance asked me and said there was a briefing. The Liberals did not invite the opposition to the briefing. That is how they have played this from day one.
The minister avoided all my questions on why Canada waited over a year to take U.S. concerns over transshipments seriously. We could have avoided section 232 tariffs. We could have been having this debate on safeguards a year and a half ago, when the Conservatives asked for it, at a time when we could have mitigated some of the impacts of safeguards.
I am going to go through those impacts now, because they are real. They affect jobs in Winnipeg, Sault Ste. Marie, Hamilton, Toronto, Prince Edward Island and wherever that guy is from. They are real because there are fabricators in all communities.
I toured a great fabrication plant, one of the largest employers on Prince Edward Island. It works with Quebec steel companies to bid on and build stairways and parts of construction in Manhattan high-rises. I know the member for Malpeque is proud of those jobs, as am I. These are all affected by poor Liberal decisions on trade policy and will be impacted by Bill C-101.
What the Conservatives want to see is mitigating the impact. We want to see western Canadian fabricators and critical public infrastructure projects like Muskrat Falls, Site C, LNG Canada and the Champlain Bridge protected by regional allocation of quota. We want to make sure that the Champlain Bridge does not cost $1 billion or $2 billion more as a result of this bill. That can be done, and it can be WTO-compliant through TRQs, regional allocation of quota for critical industry, because western Canada cannot get steel from Hamilton to Sault Ste-Marie. It is uneconomical to ship it there. We do not make enough rebar and other critical elements of plate that we need. They need to import, so let us give tariff allocation where it is needed, for example in Newfoundland and Quebec. We are going to recommend that.
We also have recommendations about the $2 billion the Liberals have collected through tariff-like taxes, through retaliatory tariffs. They said it would go as relief to small and medium-sized businesses impacted by trade disruptions, by section 232. They have not given the money. They have given some loan guarantees to the large steel players. We want to see a commitment to allocate some of those funds to the small and medium players and to address geographic concerns. If so, they will see the Conservatives work with them on Bill C-101, work with them on NAFTA, even though we are not happy with the fact that we are seeing these in the final weeks of Parliament, when the Conservatives have been asking for this for over a year.
Let us review. President Trump was not even inaugurated when the Prime Minister volunteered to renegotiate NAFTA. That was a risk we did not need to take, but when it was taken, the Conservatives put forward suggestions to the government. Let us remember that 98% of Canada's trade access was negotiated by Conservative governments, including NAFTA, including U.S. free trade. We said, let us put auto forward. Let us put softwood and key agricultural sectors forward as our priorities, because the U.S. trade representative Ambassador Lighthizer and his team had already prepared a list of priorities where the U.S. wanted to go.
The minister's speech at the University of Ottawa addressed none of the issues the U.S. wanted to talk about. The Liberals launched their much-vaunted progressive agenda and they talked about issues related to the Prime Minister's brand, but that had no relation to trade whatsoever. In fact, they did not mention auto and auto part calculation for six months. When they did, we praised them for that and there was progress finally made in the NAFTA discussions.
Mexico took the talks seriously and had 80-plus meetings with White House officials. It had a deal done before Canada did. That should trouble Canadians. The government virtue-signalled, as I call it, and put its own electoral ambitions ahead of the national interest. That should trouble Canadians.
That is why, in the final days of Parliament, we have the two most substantive economic pieces of this Parliament being rushed through in ways and means motions. It is because of incompetence. The section 232 tariffs were completely avoidable if, going back to President Obama, we had taken concerns about Chinese transshipments seriously. They were avoidable if we had taken NAFTA seriously and had put forward the auto sector, which was always going to be critical, and if we had put in softwood lumber and tried to deal with that constant generational issue that is now hurting our western producers, and if we had put in agriculture and started punching back at the administration's claims about subsidies through our supply management system. The U.S. spends more on agricultural subsidies than we do on our military. I did not hear the government pushing back on that.
The Liberals were talking about the progressive agenda with a president who they know was not quite progressive. They totally misaligned our interests. That is why Mexico, which had a weaker position going in, got a deal before Canada did. We had to scramble to try to be an add-on to that deal.
The same thing happened with tariffs. Mexico was ahead. That is why I am happy that the Conservatives collaborated. We told the ambassador that we were going down. The member for Prince Albert and I, in one day, were invited to a caucus meeting and met more members of Congress than the government did in the previous year to talk about section 232 relief.
I have talked about some of the ways we can work with the government on Bill C-101. To fix the issues that are missed, to mitigate, we are proposing an amendment to make this bill better.
I move, seconded by the member for Oshawa:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-101, An Act to amend the Customs Tariff and the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act, because it fails to:
a. take into consideration regional disparities in industry needs, specifically, that domestic producers only minimally supply certain steel products to British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador;
b. add a geographic exclusion, either exempting British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador from the proposed safeguards or allocating a dedicated share of the regional quota to British Columbia, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador;
c. stipulate specific tariff and trade disruption relief to steel fabricators;
d. mandate that the funds collected through retaliatory tariffs on the United States go to support small and medium-sized Canadian steel and aluminum fabricators and retailers impacted by the application of the retaliatory tariffs; and
e. grant specific product exclusions for certain steel products that are not produced in commercial quantities in Canada to avoid the negative economic impact of safeguards on critical public infrastructure projects like the Champlain Bridge, the Muskrat Falls Hydroelectric Dam, the Site C Dam, and projects of national economic importance like LNG Canada.