Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-2, the implementation of the Canada-European free trade agreement. The bill deals with a proposed arrangement between some of the European countries and Canada. The agreement was initiated nine years ago by the Liberal administration under Jean Chrétien. It came at a time when the ideology of free trade and the free market system was at its height. That is not the case today.
In the last 12 months, the world has seen a profound change. It has not yet played out completely around the world. It is a change that will lead us to make different choices in the future. It will lead us to situations where we must, in some cases, protect our industries. In many cases, Canadians will be obligated to take another look at free trade. For the purposes of preserving our economy, we will be obligated to better understand how the world will work.
That is what we are faced with today. We are not faced with the situation of nine years ago. We are not even faced with the situation of two years ago. We are faced with the situation that has come upon us today. If we look at the history of the opening of the liberalization of trade in Canada, for many years, we were under the guidance of a policy that said that good fences made good neighbours. In many cases, we understood that the situation in the world between countries was not open or equal. We were not in a position to allow free trade to take place. We needed to have tariffs and protection for our industries because the world was not the place it was 20 years previous.
When we started on the free trade talks and agreements that came along in the 1980s, we built them on the basis that we would open up the world economy. We were making trade and taking away barriers. We were going to create a level playing field around the world, where the best possible situation could arise for industry and commerce and permit an expansion of the world's economy. By and large, some of that worked and some did not work. Some of it was based on trade and some was based on technological advancement and many other factors.
However, today, we are dealing with where we are going in the future with trade. How do we set the path for our Canadian economy? We have seen that there is not likely to be less regulation, but more regulation. We are likely to pay more careful attention to how our industries work, not less attention.
Our amendment proposes to carve out the very important shipbuilding industry from the agreement. We do not see that this will work for our shipbuilding industry in the future. We do not see that free trade will make the kind of difference to our shipbuilding industry that we might have thought about 20 years ago. It is not the case today. This is why we are very interested in ensuring that our shipbuilding industry is protected and allowed to grow in a reasonable fashion.
Shipbuilding will have a place in Canada. We are a maritime nation. We have the largest coastline of any country in the world. A lot of that coastline is in my riding in the Arctic, among the Arctic islands. There is an enhanced interest in the development of arctic resources and arctic transportation and the use of the Arctic as the ice melts. With climate change, we see the opening up of the Arctic Ocean, the arctic shipping lanes and all of that.
It is imperative that Canada stays on top of Arctic marine shipping development. Right now that is in the hands of the Russians. They are the leaders in this field. Where are we? We are nowhere in it. We will enter into the next century of development in the Arctic, where marine transportation will be of the utmost importance, and we will have a shipbuilding industry that we have not supported and that we have not ensured has the opportunity to take advantage of this new and exciting area to work in, the Arctic.
That one factor should give us all pause. It should make us ask what is good for Canada, not what is good for the world, in our new opportunities in the new economy, which will have a very large Arctic base. Is it good simply to abandon the shipbuilding industry to the vagrancies of the world market to the kind of competition that can come not only from Norway and from that direction, but from the Koreans and the Chinese? Is that what we want to accomplish?
It is not simply about building ships. It is about all the ancillary things that go along with ships. If we are turning over the shipbuilding industry, we are turning over many of the components and technologies that can give Canada the edge in the new economy into which we are moving.
Therefore, what are we doing here? What are we trying to accomplish with this free trade agreement that was started nine years ago by the Chrétien Liberals, when free trade was popular? Are the two major parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, simply caught in their past rhetoric, in their past ideas of free trade and free markets, that they cannot see what the future holds? Can they not say that this is the direction we should go in, that this is where the new economy is, that those are the things we have to protect and that those are the things we have to create.
Is that what their problem is, that their ideology has just bound them down? They used to complain that the NDP was ideologically bound by its protectionism, by its social justice, by its concerns about the environment, so that it could not be open to the development of world trade. Times are changing and we need to respond in a fashion that is acceptable and reasonable.
When the Mulroney government got us into the free trade agreement, the allegations at the time were that the free trade agreement was supported by the Conservatives and would continue to keep our dollar high. At the time, the New Democratic Party was pushing for a lower interest rate, which would help our economy. When the Liberals got in, they actually did that. They lowered the interest rate and let the dollar fall. Under the free trade agreement with the United States, we flourished. However, was it because of the free trade agreement or because of the lower dollar? Both of those factors had to come into play.
What is happening today? We are in the midst of a major global financial crisis, which we have not settled, yet we are talking about putting ourselves into more free trade agreements, when we do not understand yet what the financial situation of the world is going to be.
When it comes to currency, what is going to happen when the price of oil, inevitably in the next 12 months, starts to rise dramatically again, when the U.S. economy recovers and when the U.S. dollar starts to fall?
