Mr. Speaker, I am sure the good people of Costa Rica rest well at night knowing the member from Winnipeg is standing up for their human rights, particularly given that Costa Rica has proportional representation, something the NDP likes but Canada does not have.
Costa Rica has a constitutional democracy and a presidential system. The president is elected for a four year term and can only be in office for one term. He can then run after eight years. It has 57 members in its legislature, which is a unicameral legislature, and a two-thirds vote of the legislature is required to change the constitution. Costa Rica has more checks and balances in its domestic law than we do.
A Canadian member of parliament states that he will lance any injustices that happen in Costa Rica. He also says that parliament has been rendered irrelevant and he references the MMT decision. The MMT decision proved that parliament had power because it was taken to court. That decision consistently gets misrepresented by the radical left in the House.
The MMT decision stated that according to the law put in place by the Government of Canada one could not import or export MMT. It was a badly written law given the realities of free trade. Free trade mandates a level playing field. A properly written law would have said that people were banned from possessing MMT on Canadian soil. In that way everyone would have been banned from possessing MMT and it would not have prejudiced Canadian people who were importing or exporting it. The law must be applied equally to everyone.
That is a standard of equality that I thought was the foundation of the NDP. The law was badly written and it did not prove that legislatures were irrelevant. In fact it proved the exact opposite.
The member says that free trade deals have a negative impact on human rights. I hesitate taking that as a credible source after the NDP bashed and attacked Suharto, the former president of Indonesia, when he came to the University of British Columbia. At the same time the British Columbia NDP were holding policy conferences in Havana, Cuba, like it did last year. Cuba is a country where Fidel Castro has driven out, incarcerated, or murdered one-fifth of the population.
I also question the veracity of the NDP when it says that it is protecting human rights and that it is opposed to free trade unless it enhances human rights.
Given that he is so in favour of international standards for human, labour and environmental rights, did he communicate that to NDP Premiers Romanow, Dosanjh and Doer when they went on the team Canada trade mission to China, given China's record on the environment vis-à-vis the Three Gorges dam and its human rights approach to Falun Gong and labour standards? Has he given the same preaching sermon to the NDP premiers of those provinces?
