Madam Speaker, I heard the member and a number of Conservatives say, “We are the party of free trade”. Please, with all due respect, this is not the Conservative Party of Brian Mulroney and Flora MacDonald. This is a much different operation. Members opposite may have hijacked the name and the brand, but it is certainly not the same party that the Progressive Conservative Party was in the 1980s and 1990s, when this deal was contemplated and came along.
I will touch on the member's comment that this deal is not good enough. In reality, the Conservatives were continuously telling the government about a year ago to take any deal. The member says it is not fair to compare this deal to no deal, but the reality of the situation is that Donald Trump had made it clear he wanted out of NAFTA unless a new deal was created.
To compare this deal to the old deal is not realistic, because we knew that the old deal was off the table. Rather than capitulating to Donald Trump, our position was to find a deal for Canada and in the process make it a better deal. That is what we ended up getting. We took care of a lot of issues that we experienced before. I hope the member will recognize this as the reality.