Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity, however late the hour, to participate in this debate on the upcoming summit of the Americas in Quebec City where, as we have all noted tonight, 34 heads of state will gather to discuss creating the free trade agreement of the Americas and where thousands of concerned Canadians will gather to express their dreams and aspirations about the country and about our responsibility as a nation on the global front.
It is very fitting that we are having this parliamentary debate at the same time and in the same week an extra-parliamentary organization came together to press for a moratorium on expanding worldwide talks to liberalize trade. I am referring to a coalition of non-government organizations that believes, quite legitimately so, that the expansion of trade talks opens the door to the privatization of essential public services and, as many of my colleagues have said tonight, erodes the authority of democracies over such vital programs as health care, education and a vast array of public service sectors.
That is really the issue of the hour. That is at the heart of the concerns being raised by my colleagues in the NDP. Certainly it is at the heart of the matter being addressed by concerned Canadians everywhere. After all, what we are talking about is our identity as a nation, our sense of who we are as Canadians, the ties that bind and the values that we bring to the world.
Clearly, we are talking about our ability as a nation to control our own destiny and the ability of our own government to shape the future, to set the agenda, not to leave it to multinational corporations that these days seem to be determining every aspect of our day to day living. We are talking about national programs that serve the public good, as my leader the member for Halifax said, now being reduced to commodities to be bought, sold and traded on the market for private gain. This possibility is really at the heart of this debate, and I think it is that which motivates so many Canadians to get involved, to rise up and to speak out about the FTAA.
One of the questions for us today is this. Are health, education and other public services actually protected under FTAA? I do not think we can answer that because there is so much secrecy, such lack of transparency and so many barricades around this issue that it is impossible to really know. Just as the government refuses to share the draft agreement with all Canadians, it has not released its proposals for services being negotiated under FTAA.
However, I think it is probably reasonable, based on past practice of the government, to assume that the approach by the government will be consistent with its approach to the WTO negotiations on GATS, or the General Agreement on Trades in Services.
The whole point of those talks is increased liberalization of trade in services. That is the essence of the whole exercise. So it is reasonable to assume that we are talking about opening up trade opportunities in such lucrative areas as health, education, energy, water and the list goes on and on.
It would seem to us that the Canadian government has actually taken no steps in those negotiations and has made no commitment to fix the flaws in the proposed the GATS and in the wording of the GATS that make all public services, including Canadian medicare, vulnerable to a challenge. Any exclusion being contemplated is being done on the most narrow of terms, only covering services and sectors which are completely within the public sector.
Given the degree to which privatization is occurring all around us and given the government's passive response to such developments as Alberta's private for profit hospital legislation, the situation really does look bleak. It is really a double whammy of trade liberalization and passive privatization which is so deathly and so worrisome.
It is a threat. It exists now under NAFTA. We have heard all kinds of opinion on that. It looms even larger under GATS and is no doubt perpetuated, based on everything we know about the government, under FTAA. It flows from the notion of equal access, and my colleague from Winnipeg Centre referenced it, to foreign opportunity and treatment that is no less favourable than that given to domestic interests. It means allowing international trade tribunals to intrude into our own domestic health policies and other domestic policies.
As I referenced in a question last week in the House, the Canadian Medical Association journal had an article that stated “There is reasonable certainty that a trade tribunal will be asked to rule on issues that are germane to the Canadian hospital sector”. In other words, the exclusion of health services totally within the public domain no longer applies. Hospitals become fair game for foreign investment and private competition.
The same opinion was given in another reputable medical journal, The Lancet which said last December that public health is being traded for private wealth. It referenced Canada's predicament because of bill 11 and how it will have an impact on all of this country's ability to govern our health care sector.
It is the same conclusion we heard from a major study done by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, authored by Matt Sanger, whose report was entitled, “Reckless Abandon: Canada, the GATS and the Future of Health Care”. It concluded that whenever any part of health care is operated by a mix of government and private organizations, foreign corporations are thus entitled to join the competition on an equal footing with local ones. It means that any new programs or any innovative health care reforms would be restricted. We would lose control over the cost drivers while maintaining responsibility for paying the cost. That is ridiculous. Non-profit endeavours slip away, we are left to pay and foreign corporations are laughing all the way to the banks.
While talking about cost drivers, I want to look very briefly at drug prices because that gives us a good insight into how much we have already catered to multinational corporations. Look at the fact that we are dealing with enormously escalating drug prices and yet the government feels compelled to cave in to multinational drug companies to protect their patent protection. It broke its promise to rescind Bill C-91. Now it has slipped through the back door Bill S-17 which would extend patent protection even more for brand name drug companies.
If anything points to how captive we have become to this global international corporate agenda, this is probably the best example. We can apply this as well to the situation we have all been hearing about in terms of South Africa. It is being sued by some 40 pharmaceutical companies because it is trying to provide cheaper generic drugs to deal with the millions of people who are infected with HIV and AIDS. I think that shows just how much of a problem this whole free trade agenda has become. I could go on with many other examples.
I will conclude by saying that we are not opposed to global actions and treaties. We know that there are discussions going on with respect to a global treaty on tobacco control. That could be a good thing. It might be one way we can stop the kind of massive control that tobacco companies have over the world, never mind just in this country.
We would certainly support global solidarity in terms of elimination of child labour, protection of refugees and dealing with environmental degradation. That is all desperately needed, and what we are saying is that it is where we must be: pursuing justice locally and globally, never forsaking our nation's sovereignty and our Canadian values.