Mr. Speaker, for the last hour or so I have been somewhat appalled by the cavalier attitude of the parliamentary secretary and some of his yappy cohorts toward the well-being and the opportunities that may be lost to earn a living by tens of thousands of Canadians who will be affected if we get ourselves into a trade war over this stupid piece of legislation. This is not a joke.
People are frightened as to what may happen if this position is overturned by the WTO, and I think it probably will be. We will be vulnerable. We will be open. To use a certain amount of care is not, with due respect, being sheepish. It is being sane and sensible. The bill can really hurt.
The parliamentary secretary says that 6,000 people will be directly affected by the legislation. I question that. There are 6,000 people working in the industry. There are not 6,000 people who will be directly affected by the legislation because we are dealing with a rather small segment of the magazine market. This is not as big an issue as the parliamentary secretary would like to make out. The potential for damage from this unimportant piece of legislation is enormous.
It behooves the parliamentary secretary to be a little more thoughtful and respectful of the hundreds of thousands of people employed in basic industries such as the agricultural industry. They are vulnerable. They have been attacked before by the Americans under trade rules. In some cases those who study this sort of thing are quivering in their shoes.
I used to have a very large German shepherd—this is a true story by the way, not a parable—that I kept fenced in my backyard. There was a little boy in the neighbourhood, who was not a bad kid, who could not resist tormenting my dog. He would go down the ally on his bicycle, run a stick along the fence and rattle the boards. Then he would get off his bicycle, look through the fence and torment my dog. One day he did that but did not realize that the back gate was open. This big dog ran out, grabbed the poor kid by the leg and gave him a pretty serious bite.
The United States is a very mean big dog. We should not torment this beast, unless we see some real benefit or some potential advantage in doing so, because he will bite. He has bitten us before and he will bite us again. We should not mess around for a trivial reason and endanger something which is terribly important to ordinary working people in this country. We can make light of this problem as much as we want, but it is not something to be taken lightly. These are very serious concerns.
We have walked down this road before on the split-run issue. We lost. If we lose a second time, the game is over and we are vulnerable for retaliation. Those guys play rough. I think a bit of common sense should be used.
Apart from the practicalities of the question, I get a little tired of members opposite who seem to believe that Canadians are children, that Canadians are incapable of managing their own affairs, that Canadians left to their own devices will buy out all the Playboy magazines in the cornerstore but will not read Saturday Night . This is rather a low view of our population but it seems to be what drives the government.
The hon. member beside me made a comment a little earlier about smother love. This is a typical example of smother love, trying to control what people read and what people hear. It is thought control. Nineteen Eighty-Four may not be very long behind us, but we still seem to have some of the ideas Mr. Orwell brought forward in his book.
Free speech, freedom to do business with whom we wish, freedom to own property and control it any way we like, free press by all means and freedom of contract, do these things not matter at all? Why are we throwing out these important aspects of our culture ostensibly to protect our culture? It is a contradiction of terms and I will not accept it.
I noticed earlier the hon. member for Brampton Centre, while my colleague was speaking, was very busily reading a newspaper. I did not notice what newspaper it was. However it occurred to me that hon. member probably would not be too happy if the media police or “Copps” cops were to say to him that he could not read that paper any more because it was published in the wrong city, never mind country. If they said they wanted him to read the Toronto Star whether or not he liked it and would pass legislation which would make, for example, the Ottawa Citizen sit up and take notice because it is not always very nice to the government, how would he feel?
I would like people to think about such things. Sure, it is a stretch but not a very long one because this is the sort of thing the government is proposing to do. It is telling Canadians what they may or may not read by using the big economic hammer on advertisers. This is shameful.
Extraterritorial legislation, which is what this is if we look at it closely, has a very bad smell in this country. Do members remember the Helms—Burton bill and how everyone from all parties was up in arms about it? Now we are coming up with our very own version of extraterritorial legislation and it is okay in the eyes of the Liberals.
Where are they coming from? Where is the consistency? Where is the basic concept of free trade which members of the government, having had their epiphany, claim now to support? They support it when it is convenient to them, but when it interferes with some of their elitist ideas they say “None of this free trade stuff”. That is bad.
I would like to relinquish the rest of my time to hear a little more from the hon. parliamentary secretary. I hope he will rise to the bait and debate.
