moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Madam Speaker, I would like to start by saying I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton Griesbach. I thank him for seconding this motion; we are very glad the Speaker recognized the issue as an emergency for Canada. The motion relates specifically to the incoming president of the United States, who has threatened a 25% tariff on Canadian workers and businesses. That would create significant economic chaos when it comes to our capabilities to provide well-paying jobs for Canadians.
I will start by noting that this type of bullying tactic has been used in the past before. At different times, Canada has had to respond appropriately to these measures. With regard to this particular tariff that is noted, it also puts us in the same position as Mexico; the Mexican government has indicated that it would respond even more forcefully than what we have seen from our Prime Minister and some of our premiers right now. Specifically, the Mexican government has talked going line by line back against the United States.
Here we are, having to compete as a North American region against the world. We have one partner with which we have engaged in a free trade agreement, both traditionally and continually, with our latest agreement still being on the paperwork and being worked on right now. This will undermine not only our domestic jobs and workers but also those in the U.S. and Mexico, because we all work toward trading and prospering together. It will further undermine our capabilities to compete with other parts of the world, where we have seen some of these practices cost jobs.
Right now, Canadians are feeling the pinch. They are certainly feeling very stressed as we go into this winter. Paycheques are getting smaller, when it comes to the inflation that has taken place. There is uncertainty with regard to pensions and benefits with the rising costs, and that is one of the reasons the New Democrats have pushed hard in the current Parliament and have been proud to get programs such as dental care and pharmacare. These are backstops that are huge and controllables that should have been done before to make us more prosperous and, more importantly, healthier and more capable of productivity in the workforce.
That is one of the big differences, as we have seen successive Conservative and Liberal governments do massive corporate tax reductions that did not see the economic prosperity that we would like to see. We saw all that wealth disappear, much of it even going to the United States, where they tax on worldwide profits. We have actually done massive subsidization of our industries and other foreign industries. That has cost us significantly, whereas dental care and health care are actually reasons to invest in Canada, and they make the controllable expense go right to the individual worker. Therefore, the workers and their families get the benefit of better health, better training and, more importantly, more contribution to society.
As we know, in regard to our relationship with the United States, we are actually in a trade surplus. They are one of the few nations that we actually have a trade surplus with, and that goes back to historic trade agreements that actually were negotiated. In brief, we had an auto pact. It was a significantly improved-upon situation in which we were the leaders in automotive manufacturing in the world, often placing first or second at different times. When we lost that capability, because we entered into our first free trade agreement, we saw the Liberal government not challenge a WTO challenge from Japan at that time, which broke that up. We have since disappeared back into eighth or ninth place with regard to automotive manufacturing and assembly.
That was not even a trade concern of the U.S. at that time, but it was of our other partners. We saw the Liberal government basically stand down on Canadians for that. Now, those eventual repercussions have come to the point at which we are doing significant incentives for automotive manufacturers, similar to what they are doing in the United States, Mexico and other places. We have an integrated market, which is certainly going to be affected by a 25% tariff, or even a 5% tariff if it comes to that.
I would also like to note that we have seen the Conservatives, in the past, not do their due diligence in protecting Canadians. In particular, with the softwood lumber industry, we actually won a WTO challenge against the United States, and we were rewarded with billions of dollars in money. We then had the Stephen Harper government abandon collecting it, with the actual effect it had on our economy.
With regard to this particular threat from Donald J. Trump, historically, we also saw tariffs and other types of issues brought on Canadians during his first term in office, so we need to take this very seriously. I give the premiers and the Prime Minister credit for at least getting together right away, and I do want to acknowledge that.
As New Democrats, we believe we are going to have to exercise our full strength on this, but that group meeting right now is insufficient to deal with the process and the crisis in front of us. We want to see labour unions, civil society and others included later on. There needs to be a war room and an actual strategy with measurables, which would involve more than just the leaders of the provinces and the Prime Minister, or a small cabal of the Liberal cabinet undertaking some of those issues the government believes are important, to deal with this. Sometimes the government has not supported the right elements to actually deal with these situations.
When I asked for the emergency debate today, only the NDP raised the issue that Trump had specifically identified the border as not being adequately resourced, or at the very least that the U.S. was having problems coming from Canada and Mexico. There is no way we would ever want to assent to the argument that the Mexican border and the Canadian border are similar, but there has been a history, which has been going on for a number of years, with the U.S. politicizing the border.
On the Canadian side, we saw the Harper administration cut over 1,100 CBSA workers, which it fired. It even fired the ones who were doing some of the work that stops gun and drug smuggling, along with a number of different things. We have not replaced those officers. In fact, we are short 2,000 to 3,000 workers right now, and they would need to be trained. We have been pushing for that.
We want to see a number of different things get done. We want to start identifying the tariffs we can actually push back on. The Harper administration actually put tariffs on Canadian companies because it did not know what it was doing. A good example is Dainty in my riding, which mills rice. It was going to get an extra tariff from the Harper administration, which would have cost it more jobs, to retaliate against the U.S. We need to start inventorying all these businesses and organizations on which there will be effects to figure out how we would do a retaliatory tariff. We need to be very sharp regarding that, and we want to prepare our challenge right now, before the president-elect takes office, because we only have a matter of months to get our situation in order.
The New Democrats are calling for a comprehensive approach that would not just be determined by government figureheads, but would involve union representation of the workers whose jobs would be threatened. It is very important to have an approach that is inclusive because workers will also be able to give us the best evidence on how we unravel some of the investments in the threats.
We also want to make sure, and this is something we have been saying for a number of years, that we stop other countries from using the environment and labour as a subsidy in our trade relationships. We finally did get this into the new agreement, but the government has not been forceful enough, and we have seen China, Mexico and other places use a practice of undercutting and depressing Canadian worker wages, making sure we do not see the successes we should when we compete in a fair way. We need to be more responsible with that.
We need to also diversify our interprovincial trade. For goodness' sake, we are still seeing problems with that. It happens all the time. Second to that is getting into other markets because, as I noted at the beginning of my speech, Canada is pretty much at the end of almost all the trade agreements. We have deficits and not surpluses, so we need to have a better strategy there.
As I conclude, I want to again call for the practical things we can control, that we can actually engage in, and doing a full strategy—
