Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague from York—Durham.
For most of Canada's history, the United Kingdom was Canada's largest trading partner. As late as 1941, the United Kingdom, not the United States, was Canada's largest export market. For those watching who wish to find this data, I found it in a Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce publication entitled “Canada's Trade Performance—1960-1977, Volume 1: General Developments”. It was published in October 1978 and is available on the department's website.
I welcome this debate on Bill C-13 because it gives us an opportunity to debate how we can increase trade and investment between Canada and the world. While the U.K. is no longer our largest trading partner, it remains an important one. Measured in two-way trade, the United Kingdom is Canada's third-largest trading partner, with two-way trade valued at $63 billion in 2024. Measured in terms of exports, the United Kingdom is Canada's second-largest export market. It is bigger than China and second only to the United States. According to Adam Murray at EDC, “As of 2025, the U.K. is Canada’s second-largest destination for total exports of goods and services, valued at $40.2 billion.”
There is a lot of opportunity to build on increasing exports to our second-largest export market, the United Kingdom, with agreements like the one before this House. There is an opportunity to increase exports with a country that is a western, liberal democracy. It is a country that not only shares our values, but shares very similar institutions, like this very House of Commons. For that second reason, it is good to increase trade with the United Kingdom.
While the United Kingdom is Canada's second-largest export market this year, it is important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of Canada's exports. The picture is not good. Canada's exports to the world, expressed as a percentage of our GDP, have massively declined over the last 25 years. Our global exports, expressed as a percentage of our GDP, went from 44% in 2000 to 32% in 2024, which is a massive drop.
I want to make three points about this big drop in exports. First, not all of this drop is attributable to a drop in exports to the United States. While global exports have dropped by about 12% of GDP over the last 25 years, not all of that is attributable to the United States. In fact, if we look at our global exports, excluding the United States, they, too, have dropped over the last 25 years by some 2%.
The second point to make about this massive drop in global exports is that most of it took place before the arrival of the Trump administration south of the border. That second point is a very important one to make.
There is a third point that I would like to make about this massive drop in these exports, most of which happened before the arrival of the Trump presidency and some of which happened to our exports outside of the United States. The big reason why this has happened, I would argue, is that Canada has become uncompetitive. No one would dispute the argument that we have become uncompetitive as a country. The fact is, as reflected by the decline in our exports over the last number of years, fewer and fewer people outside of Canada want to buy our products.
Fewer and fewer people abroad want to buy Canadian goods and services, and that is because government tax policies make it difficult to attract domestic and foreign investment, leading to a situation where Canadian companies invest in plant capital and equipment at a far lower rate than their foreign competitors. Jack Mintz argued in his paper entitled “A Proposal for a ‘Big Bang’ Corporate Tax Reform” that government tax policies have led to a situation where the marginal effective tax rate on the services sector in Canada is almost double that of other economic sectors in Canada, such as manufacturing, forestry and agriculture. The tertiary services sector, which is supposed to be the future of the Canadian economy, faces a marginal effective tax rate that is almost double that of many other sectors in the Canadian economy.
It is a result, I would argue, of regulatory policies that are stifling major investments, such as trade corridor infrastructure. Canada's trade corridor infrastructure is abysmal, and the current government has done little to address that fact. Let me highlight two examples of our abysmal trade corridor infrastructure.
To my knowledge, we are the only major OECD economy without a single national highway. In our case, we could have one running from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. In the United Kingdom, people can get on the “M” series highway and drive uninterrupted from Bournemouth all the way up to Aberdeenshire in Scotland on a four-lane, divided, limited-access highway. In the United States, people can drive from New York to L.A. on multiple four-lane, divided, limited-access interstate highways that began construction in the 1950s under the Eisenhower administration. In France, people can get on autoroutes that will take them from one side of France to the other on a limited-access, four-lane, divided highway system.
We do not have a single highway like that in Canada. In fact, what we call our Trans-Canada Highway is Highway 7, which leads out of Ottawa on the way to Toronto. The Trans-Canada Highway is a two-lane, paved road and much of it is interrupted by hundreds and hundreds of driveways, intersections and traffic lights. People cannot drive from Halifax to Vancouver in this country without encountering thousands of driveways, hundreds of intersections and dozens of traffic lights.
Another example of our abysmal trade corridor infrastructure is the port of Vancouver. The World Bank commissioned a study several years ago on the world's top 350 or so global ports, and the port of Vancouver ranked second to dead last in efficiency.
None of these issues are on the government's list of national interest projects. None of these issues are being addressed by the current government. That is, in part, why we have seen a drop in global exports to countries around the world, excluding the United States, over the last number of years. It is why global exports, expressed as a percentage of Canada's GDP, have gone from some 44% back in 2000 down to about 32% today.
I will finish with this final point. The government missed a huge opportunity when negotiating this deal with the United Kingdom to address the plight of some 120,000 Canadians living in this country and receiving U.K. pensions, which remain unindexed. It is an issue that has festered for a number of years. This was an opportunity for the government to address the plight of those pensioners. Pensioners who live in the United States, Spain, Germany and France receive indexed pensions, but pensioners living in Canada do not. The government missed a huge opportunity to address the needs of these 120,000 Canadians in negotiating this deal.