Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on behalf of the party, contrary to this particular aspect of what the Conservative government is doing. I consider the Conservative government to be so desperate to sign a trade deal with literally anybody, that it seeks one with Colombia. It wants to be like the big boys out there and say that it can play too.
I first want to put on the record that the NDP is not against trade deals. However, we would like to see deals that are fair trade deals, not trade deals that upset the environment and the workers' rights. Everyone knows that Colombia has one of the worst workers' rights records in the world. Everyone knows that a unionist in Colombia does not have a very long shelf life, as they say. The reality is that the paramilitary, with the backing of the government and others, has supported basically the riddance of some union members and other people on the left who wish to speak up for social rights, justice and the environment.
What does the government do? It seeks out friendships and trade deals with countries of this nature on the premise that we might be able to improve things and may be able to improve their situation. How has that worked for thousands upon thousands of workers in Mexico right now? Do members remember when NAFTA came along? All tides were going to rise up and the workers of Mexico were going to have the same quality and standard of life that we have in Canada.
That has not happened, and do members know why? The control is lost to governments and is turned to multinational corporations. That is what these deals are all about.
The fact is we, in the NDP, and others, and I assume the Bloc as well, are opposed to these deals because they completely ignore the human rights element and environmental aspects in Colombia. All they do is make these particular profits and motivations for trade paramount and everything else secondary. It is lust like the free trade deal and NAFTA. When we asked about labour rights and about environmental rights, what happened? They were put in a side deal, to be talked about later.
We in the NDP have been asking over and over if the government is serious about human rights and environmental rights in Colombia. Those rights should have been put into the main body of the text. The first things that should have been negotiated were human rights, workers' rights and the environmental rights and then we talk about the economy of scale and the opportunity for companies to trade back and forth and make a profit, which they should be able to do. However, we cannot separate them and put one in a side deal.
It is funny that we never hear about the economic aspects of these big resource companies being put in a side deal. They are always in the main body of the text and workers and the environment are always on the side, to be talked about later. That is not fair and it is certainly not right.
What we have said very clearly about any trade deal is that if the premise of the trade deal is to create an economy for both sides to lift up workers and their communities, then must be equal on both sides. It cannot just be a one-way street, which is what is happening here.
We know the committee on international trade was dealing with this but the government circumvents the work of the committee and goes ahead anyway. Why would the government ask a committee made up of all parliamentarians to study this particular aspect and then go ahead and proceed with it anyway? The government is circumventing its own members of Parliament. As Garth Turner once said, “The sheeples won't say anything. They're afraid that their committee chairs or something else may be taken away from them”.
The reality is that if a committee has been tasked to look into an agreement or into a particular legislation, the government should never be signing on until that work is done, a report is tabled in the House and a thorough review and analysis has done by all parliamentarians, instead of the government just riding roughshod ahead superceding Parliament's wishes in this particular regard.
I cannot say this enough. If our children looked to this Parliament, they would see a massive debt and deficit that we are leaving for them. We are leaving them an environment that, by all standards, is worsening on a daily basis. Now we have no idea if our children will have the security of long term employment that we ourselves had. This is the legacy we are leaving our children.
What does the present government do and what did the previous government do? They both rushed out to make these trade deals thinking that if we just keep trading with countries like Colombia everything will be better. That is simply not true.
For those of us who have toured Mexico, we know that a lot of people in Mexico are not better off by NAFTA. There is no question that some communities have done better, but most Mexican workers are not that much better off than they were before. We were promised that the workers in Mexico would have similar rights to our workers in Canada, but when the trade deal was signed, thousands of Canadians lost their jobs and a lot of businesses left Canada to go elsewhere.
We are still in debt and have a massive deficit, and what does the government do? It searches out countries like Colombia with a terrible human rights record and bad environmental standards and we want to trade with that country. For the life of me, I do not understand why the--
