Mr. Speaker, I thank many of the other speakers we heard tonight for some very interesting debate and points of view. I also wish to inform you, Mr. Speaker, that I will be splitting my time with the member for Winnipeg North Centre.
I begin my remarks by restating something that was said by the member for Burnaby—Douglas. He started his speech with a quote from the head of the former head of the WTO, Renato Ruggiero, who said that these trade agreements were necessary because:
There is a surplus of democracy in the world which is interfering with the free movement of capital and investment.
That more than anything, perhaps, sums up the NDP's objections and apprehension about trade agreements like those we are entering into. There is a significant group of people in the world today who honestly believe that there is a surplus of democracy in the world that is interfering with the movement of capital.
Those same people would have us believe that the globalization of capital is a fait accompli, just a matter of fact that cannot be changed. Yet when we come to them with the question of why we cannot have the globalization of human rights, labour standards and environmental standards, suddenly these are impossible. They cannot even be debated. There is no room for them at the negotiating table. Those issues are not issues of any substance.
The member for Lac-Saint-Jean, in one of the most visionary things I heard tonight, asked if it would not be wonderful if the world's leaders would come together in some kind of virtual global assembly and actually talk about those issues.
We would not be as apprehensive about these international agreements if we were comfortable that those things were being dealt with.
The reason it took the European Union 20 years to negotiate the EU agreement was that it dealt with those substantive issues. It dealt with the issue of raising up the lowest common denominators to a harmonious average instead of gravitating to the lowest common denominator, as is contemplated in the virtually unchecked free trade agreements that we have now.
That is why I am proud to say the NDP caucus will be in Quebec City. We will be there in solidarity with those who have similar fears and apprehensions. We will be involved in peaceful protest. We were at APEC in Vancouver. I was there, along with the members for Burnaby—Douglas, Yukon, and Vancouver East. We were also in Windsor and Seattle. We have been a part of this growing movement around the apprehension that more and more young Canadians feel about our democracy being diminished and that these trade agreements do constitute a legitimate threat to democracy.
We need no further evidence than the quote I gave, but another world leader, a former member of parliament, Donald Johnston, said “Free trade agreements by their very nature are designed to force adjustments on our societies”. In other words, they dismantle the public policy instruments that we have laboriously put in place in the post-war era to take care of our personal needs and to grow independently with some autonomy. Now we are told we must harmonize, at least when it comes to those public policy instruments, and dismantle them so that we do not interfere with the movement of capital by corporations.
The member for Winnipeg—Transcona made a brilliant point. He pointed out the bizarre spectacle of watching us willingly dismantle the nation state of Canada and our own economic sovereignty in order to accommodate a foreign corporate interest. Why would we do that? When somebody does write the history of this era they are going to look at it as if we were crazy. We are taking something as precious as true free democracy and we are knowingly and willingly weakening our ability to have our own domestic economic sovereignty.
If we need a graphic example, these spiralling out of control energy costs that most Canadians have been reeling with all winter are a good example. Natural gas is a resource that we all own which is part of our birthright and part of our common wealth. Yet we are not allowed any preferential pricing to Canadians because of NAFTA. When we ask why it costs so much for something that we have in abundance underneath our own feet, the answer is that we cannot sell our natural gas any cheaper than we sell it to our export customers because of NAFTA. We traded that away.
No wonder Canadians are apprehensive about what is in the actual text of the FTAA. Every time we raise it we are assured that the government would not do anything foolish to jeopardize our health care system or our education system. When NAFTA was negotiated, it was like Jack and the Beanstalk taking his cow and trading it for three beans with no guarantee that any of them would sprout.
The government will not tell us what it will be talking about or what it will be negotiating at the FTAA. Members of parliament in the federal House of Commons do not have a right to know what the government is negotiating on our behalf around the table. It is absolutely scandalous.
I know why we are not allowed to see that text. It was pointed out in earlier speeches. We found out the text of the MAI because somebody posted it on the Internet. Within days every college kid in the country was reading this negotiated MAI text. They saw what was being given away. They also saw a charter of rights for corporations at the expense of freely elected governments. They recoiled with horror, took to the streets and they stopped it. When we see the text we have a fighting chance to put an end to it or at least have our opinion known and be part of that debate.
That is why I think it is an international conspiracy to keep this text secret. If the government were serious about how it would never do anything to jeopardize the legitimate right of nations to dictate their own social policy instruments and that nothing it would do would interfere with social policy, then let us see the text. We could put this whole thing to bed. We would be in bed instead of being up in the middle of the night right now.
There are other graphic illustrations. How do we know that we are not going to get sucked into the worst properties of NAFTA with this FTAA. It really is a super NAFTA that we are witnessing being created here.
Chapter 11 of NAFTA, which was raised earlier, gives the investor state status whereby a foreign corporation can sue the Government of Canada if the government interferes with what the corporation perceives to be its right to make a living, and suffers some lost opportunity by something the government did.
A recent example of this was when Canada wanted to ban MMT as a gasoline additive because it did not think it was healthy. In fact, we think it is poisonous. Ethyl Corporation that made MMT said that we could not interfere with its right to sell its product in our country and successfully sued us for many millions of dollars because of lost opportunity.
This is what I mean about how we are losing our ability to take care of our own domestic interests because of trade agreements we have signed. It is not just radicalism. It is not anti-anything to be apprehensive about the free trade agreement. If anything, the NDP caucus is for free trade. We are free traders. We agree we are a trading nation and that it is absolutely necessary.
The old definition of free trade used to be eliminating tariffs and barriers so that we could trade openly with other countries without barriers being imposed. The new definition of free trade agreements goes very far beyond anything that was ever contemplated before.
Now we have a good reason to believe that even the services that we offer, because some of those services have been privatized or commercialized per se, are now subject to challenge under free trade agreements, things like education. The more we flirt with the privatization of our public school system or our health care system, it could be that we will be subject to challenge by some American or international corporation that feels that they should be able to make a profit on offering that service in the country.
These are our fears, which we believe are legitimate. We are proud to go to Quebec City and make those fears known. We condemn the government for doing everything it can to stifle legitimate peaceful protest.