Mr. Speaker, what we see here is yet again the unmasking of the NDP's real agenda on the economy and trade. We sat here for dozens of hours listening to the NDP invent bogus facts about the supposed systematic human rights violations in Colombia.
I went down for the inauguration of the new president of Colombia last month in Bogota. The NDP has continually talked about assassinations of union leaders. I learned from the United Nations human rights representative in Colombia that most of the labour union assassinations were people such as local teacher union leaders assassinated by the FARC, the communist far-left guerrillas.
What this demonstrates is that the NDP was not really concerned about human rights in Colombia, because it is not raising human rights in one of the more relatively stable democracies of Central America, Panama. It is opposed to trade. The real question is this: why is it that the NDP refuses to raise the living standards of people in these developing countries who know that the best way forward to higher living standards is access to external markets?
Why is it that the NDP criticizes our dependence on the United States' export market but opposes every single effort to expand and diversify our export markets through additional trade agreements? Why?