Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to rise today in the parliament of America's 51st state, albeit in the absence of its governor.
All kidding aside, I think we are dealing here with a very important, troubling situation. Let us be clear: We must not bury our heads in the sand, but neither should we engage in fearmongering. We are still talking about the threat of tariffs, but our discussions centre around issues that are still hypothetical. Very hypothetical, in fact. The basis for all this is a message posted on Truth Social, but one must read it to the end. People saw it as an announcement that these tariffs would be imposed on January 20, when Mr. Trump assumes the U.S. presidency, but the message goes on to say that tariffs will be imposed unless profound changes are made at the Mexican and Canadian borders.
I think we must also consider Mr. Trump's history, especially in the business world, and the vision he has always had, both as a candidate and as President during his first administration. Although it is safe to say that Mr. Trump has changed the face of politics and has in some way innovated it, his vision of international relations remains a traditional one. It is a 1990s vision of a purportedly happy “pre-globalization” era. People began to think there would be a new world order, international citizenship, global rules that would bring an end to all rivalries and to national interests, even to nations themselves. That certainly is no longer the case. Mr. Trump has always had a far more traditional, confrontational vision, one that sees negotiations between sovereign states as being based on their relationships and balance of power.
Although this announcement is not really an announcement, it can be viewed as concerning. It is fair to assume that the incoming U.S. administration and the President-elect are flexing their muscles and planning to negotiate to obtain something. This is clearly reflected in his position, which we can disagree on. Mr. Trump's position on a host of global conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, shows that according to his vision, each side must make concessions. There is every reason to assume that this is what is happening now.
The fact remains that for the Bloc Québécois, and the independence movement in particular, trade and economic relations with the United States is of fundamental importance. That is based on a historical calculation. That was the bet made by the independence movement and its great economists, Jacques Parizeau and Bernard Landry, before they each became premier, in 1994 and 2001, respectively. Well before then, the question of free trade arose during the time of Brian Mulroney against a backdrop of U.S. protectionism. The United States Congress is after all very protectionist. President Reagan wanted to take advantage of a window to sign a free-trade agreement with Canada, and it was thanks to Quebec's and the independence movement's support that it came to pass.
Today we see that we may have gone too far in some respects, and that we were probably too dependent on free trade. Also, starting in the 1990s, we crossed the fine line between facilitating commercial trade and signing extremely restrictive agreements seeking a total commodification of life and elevating multinationals to the status of sovereign powers. We crossed that line, we went too far. This was our thinking at the time. We had just lost a referendum in 1980 because of economic fears, irrational fears in many ways, and the separatist movement decided that it would never again depend on the federal government's whims. We decided to never again be victims of federal blackmail and threats by prioritizing north-south trade rather than east-west trade. As we can see, that worked.
Today, the United States is Quebec's main trade partner. Some 12,000 Quebec companies do business with Uncle Sam. Among the many that stand out are Couche-Tard, Cascades, Hydro-Québec, CGI, Agropur, Saputo, Fruits d'Or and Miralis.
Almost 50% of Quebec's GDP is directly related to our exports. We are an export economy. Of these exports, 70% go to the United States, with approximately 10% going to New York in particular. It is also worth mentioning that many of our artists are much loved in the U.S. One of them is Robert Lepage. In short, it is undeniable that the United States is of capital importance for Quebec's economy.
What then do we do?
As I mentioned in my introduction, we must first realize that American power has changed. In the 1990s, the United States promoted globalization. When I say globalization, I do not just mean global trade. At the time, globalization was favoured as an approach that would create global institutions, almost a global society, as President Clinton's secretary of state openly said at the time.
That is no longer the case. After years and even decades of western naivete in the face of Chinese power, we began to notice that globalization was benefiting China rather than the United States, as had initially been the case. The wake-up call was brutal. In addition, the institutions created by the United States after World War II, like the World Bank and, in 1995, the World Trade Organization, began losing much of their power. We can see that today with the emergence of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Regional blocs have begun to form, which means the end of American hegemony. We could even say that Washington is no longer interested in American hegemony. Today, Washington no longer wants to be a superpower or the global police. Washington has given up on that. I think that is the first thing we need to realize.
The United States never really bought into this happy globalization myth, either. At the time it was directly in line with their interests. Even Ronald Reagan, as pro-free trade as he was, introduced punitive tariffs on Japanese cars in the 1980s and played a leading role in repatriating the automobile industry to North America. It worked. When the balance of power is reconstituted and there is recentralization toward regional blocks and away from a unipolar world dominated by a single country, we need to acknowledge that.
We alone cannot change the world. We can exert a positive influence, and we can certainly make the best of the circumstances. This begins with a clear-eyed assessment of where things stand. No one country can rebuild a North American supply chain. The U.S. cannot do it alone. Mexico cannot do it alone. Canada cannot and Quebec cannot do it alone. All of us together, however, can.
Needless to say, there are many areas where the Americans will need us. For example, there is this one file in particular. It must be said that most of the trade irritants we might have with the United States could no doubt be resolved or lessened if everyone had a better understanding of their mutual interest. There is the matter of transportation electrification, for example. The U.S. passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which introduced tax credits. Contrary to Ottawa's claims, it is not true that all of the tax credits in the act apply to all North American production. They are truly misinformed if that is what they are asserting. I remember when President Biden made that claim right here. I saw members on the other side of the House rise in applause. It betrays a total lack of understanding, and certainly a failure to have even read it, because the 45X credit, for example, applies only to batteries assembled not in North America but in the United States. This poses a huge threat to our industries.
While nearly all of the battery factories will be built in China, a country that is mounting a powerful offensive to get its hands on critical minerals in nearly every corner of the world, it is only by acting together that North America can rise to the challenge. Also, while the United States is in the midst of a housing crisis, we have wood here. It seems to me that we have a good argument for ending the lumber crisis and the punitive tariffs on lumber. After 40 years, this has become background noise rather than breaking news. Further, I am not afraid to say that supply management is not only a model that is in our interests to defend. It is a model that the United States could take a page out of, as it guarantees food autonomy, land use and the development of our communities and our rural towns and villages.
There are some issues in which Canada has flagrantly failed, under governments of all stripes, which always favour the interests of other provinces over Quebec's. We saw that with the supply management issue in Canada's agreement with Europe. At the time, the Harper government decided to favour western beef. It was not interested in Quebec dairy production. By the way, western beef did not even make it to Europe, because the Europeans have a bunch of non-tariff measures in place. The same thing happened with the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The federal government had a choice. It could defend Ontario steel, Quebec aluminum or both. Obviously, it chose to defend Ontario steel with its formula requiring the use of 70% North American steel, but 70% North American aluminum parts. That meant that Chinese and Indian dumping in Mexico could continue. These countries could export liquid, cast or smelted aluminum, and Mexico could then use it to make parts. That way, the parts were technically made in North America. That is called dumping.
At the time, we pointed out that there was dumping going on and that aluminum had not been given the same status as steel. At first, the federal government said we were wrong. To borrow a phrase from my colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent, the government was “burying its head in the ostrich”. The government denied that it was applying a double standard. It did acknowledged it later, because of the agreement with the Bloc Québécois promising that, if dumping were observed, the agreement would be reopened and they would get equivalent status. It is the same thing with the United States and Mexico. They all ended up acknowledging the dumping.
Setting aside all of these issues on which the federal government always leans away from Quebec, just like the Supreme Court, which Maurice Duplessis once compared to the Tower of Pisa, there are a bunch of issues on which where Washington is completely justified in demanding better from Ottawa. I have often talked with members of Congress. They are convinced that Chinese solar panels that are stopped at the U.S. border are simply sent to Canada instead, which has no problem letting them in. We saw the same thing happen with the screening of goods produced by forced labour coming from a single region, Xinjiang, the Uyghur region of China. The United States has seized billions of dollars in goods. At last count, Canada had not seized any at all. Apparently, we are now up to six shipments. That is far from where we should be.
The United States may have good reason to view Canada not as the 51st state, but more like China's backyard, with no control of its border. This relates not only to the issues that have have rightly been raised about drug smugglers, street gangs and crime at the border, but also to the trade component when it comes to goods made with forced labour entering Canada.
In the March 2023 budget, the government specifically wrote that legislation would be introduced to “eradicate forced labour from Canadian supply chains” and to gain better control over the border by the end of 2023. We are at the end of 2024, and the budget tabled in March of this year made the same promise. It said that this would happen by the end of the year. All signs point to Parliament rising for Christmas today, yet there is still no whiff of any such bill.
It is no wonder that the Americans look at Canada in this light, since it proudly claims to be a postnational state. It also shows that the feds understand nothing about strategy and geopolitics. One needs to understand the domestic realm in order to understand the international realm, but Ottawa does not know the first thing about it.
The same is true when it comes to controlling and monitoring investments. The U.S. has extremely robust tools and laws to control and monitor investments. In contrast, Ottawa takes a laissez-faire approach. The choice is therefore as follows. We realize that a new president is about to take office, and Canada might have a new prime minister. We will have to wait and see. However, we understand and want to emphasize that we need an election, because Ottawa has no legitimacy as far as Washington is concerned right now. Things are about to get rough in the next little while, and we have an extremely fragile government.
As a Quebec separatist, I think Quebec understands what economic nationalism is all about. Since the 1960s, it has been developing its own strategic levers, strategic legislation and organizations like Hydro-Québec, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Investissement Québec. An independent Quebec will be an infinitely better bet on the world stage and in the realm of international geopolitics than a postnational Canada could ever be.