Mr. Speaker, it is great to reach this state in the House with CETA, to see see it come to fruition in the House now, hopefully go on to committee, get passed in committee, and then move forward.
The Conservatives will be supporting this legislation. It is good for Canadians all across Canada from coast to coast to coast. Whether we look at the agriculture sector, the small and medium enterprises, union jobs, or service industry jobs, this is a great agreement for Canadians.
I want to compliment and express my gratitude to people like Steve Verheul and his team for all the work they have done for this agreement in the background, and for the hours and hours of the painstaking combination of flights and meetings they had to go through to get to the detail that we have here today to get this agreement, which is a good agreement, for all Canadians.
It is also encouraging to see the Liberal government embrace what was done in the previous government and carrying it past the finish line. This is important for all Canadians, especially when we look at our sectors here in Canada. We are an exporting country. We are a country that builds and produces more than we could ever consume. Therefore, it is very important that we export.
Also, I will inform members that I will be sharing my time with the member for Mégantic—L'Érable. He has some great comments that he wants to make on this agreement as well.
The EU represents 500 million people. It boasts an economic activity of $20 trillion annually. It is the world's largest economy.
When I worked for Flexi-CoiI and Case New Holland, I was the marketing manager for seeding equipment in Europe. We were looking at different components going into Europe, because, of course, the stuff we built in Saskatchewan was way too big for the European Union's usage. However, I can remember going through the homologation process, the tariff process, to try and understand how it all worked, and also being very frustrated when we had components and products that we wanted to sell into Europe.
The frustration was not only the tariff that would be applied, but the rules that would be applied, and the non-tariff trade barriers that would be applied. All those things were sitting there as hurdles that we had to face. In a lot of cases, European-made products did not face the same hurdles. I found it very unfair and frustrating that a plant in Saskatoon was developing and building stuff, and building it cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and if we built that same product in Europe, we would actually have had an easier process to reach the marketplace. However, when we built in Saskatoon the exact same product, it had a tough time getting to the European market.
Therefore, to see this agreement come to fruition is so important, because it has a mechanism in it to get rid of those non-tariff trade barriers. It removes those barriers and gives the ability to take a product that is made here in Canada and sell it into Europe hassle free. I think that is very important. As we start the exercise of selling the products that we make here in Canada into Europe, we are going to find our small and medium enterprises grow and be stronger. We will also be diversifying ourselves in other markets. It is always a healthy thing to have two or three customers instead of just one big customer.
Bilateral trade would increase by 20%, or $12 billion annually, which is equivalent to adding $1,000 for the average Canadian family, or adding 80,000 new jobs. However, I would put a condition on that. When we bring in a carbon tax, new taxes for families, and taxes for small and medium enterprises, we lose the benefit. This is the concern I have when we start seeing things like carbon taxes come to Canadian businesses here. After all the work we have done to create markets for them, we would lose the benefit, because we have made their cost of production so high they cannot compete by producing in this country.
It has not sunk in on the other side that when the government raises a tax, it costs somebody money. It brings our costs up higher. We compete on a global stage, and so we have to make sure that we have the lowest production cost so that we can compete fairly on that stage.
Therefore, I would put a word of warning out to our colleagues across the aisle to understand that, as they start bringing in all of these taxes, all this spending, and all these deficits, the people who are going to pay are families. They will not have jobs, because companies that they want to work for cannot build the product that they are making cheaply enough to compete on the global stage due to carbon taxes and other things that the Liberals have put on there. We have to be very careful with that.
In Saskatchewan, CETA will be very important, whether we ship agricultural goods, chemicals, or plastics. The service sector accounts for 57% of the Saskatchewan GDP and employs close to 390,000 people. This is very important to all of those people. I look at the pulse production, and the farmers in the field having that market access to Europe. It is a very wealthy market with people who want the products we grow and the products we produce. It is so important to have access to that market, which can actually pay for stuff.
Again, going back to Flexi-Coil, there were markets that we could actually sell stuff into but could never get paid. There was always a problem with eastern Europe and places like that. We had the product, they wanted the stuff we built, but because they could not pay us, they could not buy it.
In Europe that is not a problem. Europeans can pay. They have the cash. They have the ability to finance. They have the ability to take the products that we make and buy them, but when we put tariffs and restrictions on them, they cannot get access to them. This would remove the restrictions and the tariffs, and I think we will see a lot of componentry from Canada going to Europe. That is good for the environment.
I look at no-tillage. I will use this example. We had a zero-till opener called “Barton opener” with very low disturbance. In Europe right now, if members understand ploughing habits, they go in with a plough, they turn the soil over, and release all the carbon that they sequestered that year by working that ground until it is black and then losing all the advantage from the organic matter and everything else that has built up throughout the year. We took the Barton over, which is a disc opener, a no-till opener, and we would not do that. They would save that one operation of ploughing. They would actually just direct-seed right into the stubble like we do here in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. We would save that carbon in the ground, plant that seed precisely where it needed to be planted, and it would grow in the stubble. That seedling is actually protected by the stubble that is there from the environment. They have kept the organic matter in the soil, and that is also good for the environment. The Europeans were embracing that technology.
One of the issues they had was that we put it on machines that were 40 , 50, and 60 feet wide, where they wanted three, four, and six metres. When we started looking at the sizes we had to take that componentry and built it for that size. We could do that. It was something that we could work on and do. Actually, we could get into three-metre road widths that they wanted us to be into, and actually get into 12 metres and widths beyond that. As their farms are getting bigger in France and former East Germany, they want those types of componentry but they need to get through the roads and the small towns. We could do that. We had the technology. We would do all that work, and then they would bring in homologations and then bring in non-tariff trade barriers.
They would bring up reasons why we could not sell that in Europe. The reality is if we had built that same product in Europe we would not have faced any of those issues. Now, with CETA coming into play, we could build those products here in Canada and our small and medium enterprises could actually sell them into Europe and capitalize on the componentry that they have spent so many dollars researching and developing. That componentry, in this case, will reduce our carbon footprint globally. Again we are helping the environment by improving the CETA deal.
One thing that I think we have to be very careful about is talking about diversifying markets. It is good to see that we are going to go into the Canada–Ukraine free trade agreement. That is very important. I am very disappointed to see that the Prime Minister offered up the NAFTA basically on a silver platter. That really is a major blunder. We heard presidential candidate Santorum saying it was a major blunder by our Prime Minister to do that. Then to have him double down on that is even worse. The reality is the U.S. market is very important. It has always been and will continue to be an important market. Until we see exactly what happens in the U.S., I do not think anybody should overreact. We should all just take a step back and wait and see what happens.
One thing we do that is prudent, no matter who is in power in the U.S., is diversify into markets other than the U.S. That is something that the previous Conservative government did by signing close to 35 trade deals across the globe so that our Canadian companies had options other than the U.S. to sell their products and goods into. That is why TPP is very important. That the other countries are willing to go it alone without the U.S. and TPP and Canada is sitting on the sidelines is a mistake. Japan is involved in the TPP and that group of six. Japan is a major client for Canadian businesses. That is the third-largest economy in the world. Now we have CETA on the east, and if we had the TPP on the west, just think what that would mean for Canada's position in the global economy; just think of the markets we would have access to in order to sell products built here in Canada and shipped out of Canada. Nobody else in the world would have that advantage. That was such a good thought process. I give credit to the former trade minister, our former agriculture minister, and former prime minister Harper for thinking through that.
Two-thirds of Canada's GDP or one in five Canadian jobs is tied to trade. CETA is an excellent step in the right direction, but the Prime Minister must pursue these steps even more aggressively. We do not ever want to be at a disadvantage. We do not ever want to be in a scenario where we are tied to one country or one region. That is why I try to make the point that CETA is good for moving forward, TPP is good for moving forward. We have the trade agreements with other countries, which is also good.
Our companies are going to be positioned very well to move into the future as far as market access and non-tariff trade barriers go. Let us not hang them with carbon taxes and other taxes that make it impossible for them to produce the products that they design and make here in Canada. We want products built here so that we have Canadian jobs. Let us make sure that we have the environment for companies to do that.
