Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the hard-working exporters of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C-13, an act to bring the United Kingdom into the Pacific trade deal. As Conservatives, we support free trade and we support the bill; what we do not support is Liberal incompetence.
The bill is a testament to Liberal mismanagement. It is a cautionary tale for Canadians, a warning that the Liberals may not be the crack trade negotiating team they claim to be. They have failed our farmers, they have failed our permanent residents and clearly they are failing to secure more free trade.
We will start with trade. Under Brian Mulroney, Canada negotiated the Canada-U.S. free trade deal and its successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the decade of darkness, under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, Canada negotiated just three small deals: with Israel, with Costa Rica and with Chile. What followed was a decade of dynamism under Stephen Harper, and with Stephen Harper, Canada negotiated deals with Peru, Colombia, Jordan, Panama, Honduras, Korea, Ukraine, the 27 members of the European Union and the 11 members of the trans-Pacific partnership.
Our Conservative Party built Canada into the freest trading nation on earth. Unfortunately, things began to change for freer trade after we left office, and the United States pulled out of the trans-Pacific partnership. Under Trudeau, free trade negotiations broke down with India. The deal Trudeau signed to replace NAFTA reduced free trade and even went so far as to ban the American Super Bowl commercials from airing in Canada.
Once America's Republican Party moved away from unwavering support for free trade, the regressive left saw its opportunity. The left has always bitterly opposed free trade. Older Canadians may remember the vicious attack ads the Liberal Party ran, erasing Canada's border during free trade debates. Trudeau nearly derailed the trans-Pacific partnership in order to include new clauses in the agreement similar to the anti-economic development policies he imposed on Canada.
However, the worst was yet to come. After Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the Liberals forced that desperate nation to renegotiate its free trade deal with Canada. The Liberal goal was to impose carbon tariffs on Ukraine if the Ukrainians did not increase their own carbon tax to match Canada's. Forcing a country fighting for its very existence to renegotiate an existing deal was truly beyond the pale. It was the kind of diplomacy that would make Tony Soprano proud.
I can already hear my Liberal colleagues clenching their teeth, and I am sure they want to jump to their feet in protest. They would tell us that this is not the old Trudeau government and that it is a new, improved Brookfield government. Although Trudeau was a deplorable prime minister, at least he never ran on a promise to increase tariffs for Canadians.
It has been only 11 months, but the collective amnesia about the current Prime Minister is shocking. The man from Brookfield spelled out his plan on the very first day of campaigning for the Liberal Party leadership. His plan is tariffs. He calls them carbon border adjustments, but that is clearly intended to mislead people into supporting tariffs, and here is how it works. The Prime Minister will dramatically increase the industrial carbon tax, and this will make Canadian industry less competitive against industries of our major trading partners, such as the U.S. or the U.K. In order for these companies to compete, the Prime Minister will impose carbon tariffs and call it a carbon competitiveness strategy.
That is why the Liberals reopened the Ukraine deal; that is likely why they cannot get a bilateral deal with the United Kingdom; that is why we are all pretending that the United Kingdom is now a warm, sunny Pacific island nation that is eligible to join the trans-Pacific partnership; and that is why, during the middle of our recent federal election, the Prime Minister received a warm endorsement from President Trump.
When the President wrote on Truth Social that he and the man from Goldman agreed on many things, we thought they meant they agreed on signing giant novelty decorations or using police as props for photo-ops. What we should have realized is that they agree on using tariffs as a social engineering tool. The U.S. President believes tariffs can undo automation, while the Prime Minister thinks they can cool the planet. The simple truth is that all a tariff can do is hurt the economy, and the only way to make the damage to an economy worse is to use non-tariff trade barriers to free trade.
As I said at the start, the bill is another example of Liberals' failing to secure a trade deal. Thanks to Brexit, we had leverage over Britain. We had cards to play, yet we folded. The United Kingdom is keeping in place its non-tariff barriers on Canadian beef and pork. The U.K. claims our food safety system is unsafe. Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Mexico and all the other partners of the trans-Pacific partnership all agree Canadian food is safe. The U.K. is supposed to have agreed to respect our food safety system when it joined the partnership, yet two years on, here we are, ratifying U.K.'s entry, and the barriers remain in place.
What is the government's response? It promised that if the U.K. continues doing what it has always done, the government will write a stern letter and then launch a lengthy trade complaint process at the World Trade Organization. In the meantime, the U.K. producers will continue to sell millions of dollars' worth of beef and pork while our farmers wait and wait. The only relief these farmers will find is in knowing that they are not in the softwood lumber business; it is clear that this Brookfield government is treating our forestry industry as a card it hopes to play to save its EV subsidies in Ontario and Quebec.
The problem is that the government is playing go fish while the rest of the world is playing high-stakes poker. This might explain the shabby treatment shown to British retirees now living in Canada. Just as with our farmers, the government had leverage over our mother Parliament. The Prime Minister is burning up his carbon allowance, flying around the world looking for deals, the same way countless U.K. prime ministers have been doing since Brexit. We had a golden opportunity to support people living in Canada, but the Liberals could not be bothered to try.
For any Canadians unfamiliar with the issue, the U.K. has a public pension like ours. When British retirees move abroad, they continue to receive their pension. If they live in the rebellious colonies to the south, their U.K. pension is indexed to inflation. If they live in the loyal Dominion of Canada, they receive a fixed amount from the day they first applied. This issue directly affects 100,000 U.K. retirees who live in Canada, but indirectly it affects every Canadian.
Each month, 100,000 of our neighbours and friends get a little poorer. Each month, they have less to spend buying Canadian beef for supper. Each month, they have a little less to donate to the local church. Instead of having free time to volunteer at the food bank, they spend that time shopping at the food bank. This is not just hurting U.K. pensioners; it is discriminating against people living in Canada, and it is an insult.
The problem is that the former prime minister thought Canada was a nation of colonizing racist misogynists who deserve to be insulted. The new Prime Minister is an unabashed anglophile. As kids might say, he is a simp for Keir Starmer. Every country has its own shibboleths, the secret code words that allow fellow citizens to know if someone is one of us. As a bilingual country, it is not about how we pronounce it; it is about how we spell it.
In Canada we spell “catalyze” with a “z”, but the Prime Minister spells it with an “s”. He is less of a Manchurian candidate and more of a Manchester candidate. He is all too happy to sell out U.K. pensioners living in Canada and to sell out our beef and pork farmers if it means a chance at knighthood. The next time he gets together with his friends at Davos, they had better all address him as Sir Brookfield. I know that some people might find that ridiculous, but it is more comforting than reality.
The plain truth is that the Liberals are just incompetent with trade negotiations. It has been 10 years without a softwood lumber deal. There is the trade deal with the U.S. that the Prime Minister promised he would negotiate by mid-summer. There is also the time Trudeau almost blew up the trans-Pacific partnership so he could insert some feminist language into a meaningless annex. The fact that the bill before us is only at second reading is itself an example of Liberal incompetence on the trade file.
Canada needs free trade, but it finds itself in a trade war. We need a government that truly believes in trade. We need a Conservative government.