Madam Speaker, before I begin, I want to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the good member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
While Canada has a long history with the United States of America, I also have a long relationship with the United States of America. I grew up in Alberta, and have been very fortunate to vacation in the U.S. many times, like so many other Canadians, although not recently, of course.
More importantly, I was fortunate to live for five years in the United States. The first two were when I did my Master of Business Administration at Rutgers University while living in Manhattan, in New York City. Those were certainly incredible years. That was when my love for the United Nations developed, which eventually led to my diplomatic career.
The other three years I spent serving as Canadian consul to Dallas, Texas. I came to love Texas and the people of Texas. They have many similarities with Alberta, including good barbecue and rodeo. I certainly loved those things and had my son Edward there. I am the mother of an American. I am very proud of that.
I also did important work there. Keystone XL was the main issue and file that I worked on during my time there. This was in a different context, when Barack Obama was President of the United States. It was during the Harper years, yet with the Obama administration, so it was very challenging to get that policy and that project through.
As I attended different hearings throughout my jurisdiction in the southwestern United States, it became very clear that Canada and the U.S. had different positions relative to the Keystone XL file. However, I recognized at the time that the project was in the best interests of Canada, so I continued to fight for it until my time as consul to Dallas concluded in 2013.
Prior to that, I was chargé d'affaires for Canada to El Salvador. At that time, the CA4 free-trade agreement was going on, and there were very competitive words and positions on things such as pork and sugar. I remember being involved in those negotiations, especially throughout the time that my ambassador had to be out of the country.
Diplomacy and negotiation with other nations is not foreign to me. As I look upon my experience and the potential between two nations, I have some basic rules I would like to share. The first is that we need to respect ourselves. This means always thinking ahead to what can be expected or anticipated. Most importantly, we need to consider what we want and need, and what we want to come out of something with. We need to evaluate our priorities and take an inventory of what we have. The second rule is that we must respect our partner. We must think of what they want, look for mutual areas of co-operation and create options. This is very important for diplomacy. The third rule is that we must respect the process. We must recognize that everyone will always put their own interests first, but they are for the hope of mutual collaboration for beneficial outcomes.
I want to talk about what I saw with the Harper administration relative to the Trudeau government, and the fundamental problems that have manifested between Canada and the U.S.
Looking back to the Harper administration, I spent one year as a political adviser to the member for Thornhill, who at the time was minister of state for the Americas. We worked alongside titans of politics including John Baird, Jason Kenney and the former prime minister himself, Stephen Harper.
They were different from the current administration in that they were undying in their values. They had a set of core values based on democracy, justice and prosperity for Canada. Those were unwavering. They did not consider third party opinions, like those of the World Economic Forum or what people thought at Davos, and they did not bow down to bullies. They always stood for our principles.
I compare that with what I see here today with the Trudeau government and the history that we have seen in the past five years. Its foreign policy is—