Madam Speaker, I am not an expert in foreign trade, although I am a person with a small business and I do some foreign trading in a variety of forums. I am a forester and a biologist, and I am still listening and learning in this debate.
However, I am alarmed about what I hear about Bill C-46. Despite popular mythology, the NDP is not protectionist. The NDP believes in trade and the jobs that are created by trade, but we believe in fair trade, trade that is fair to all parties, all Canadians, not just large multinationals but fair to average Canadian citizens, to our middle class, our working people, people with small businesses, trade that is fair to workers and fair in the area of women's equity.
Forget about Latin American countries, where they have far to go. Canada still has huge gaps in pay equity, which is shameful. We believe in trade that is fair to farmers, especially farmers of small and medium size farms across Canada.
My area of expertise is in the environment and I am concerned about fairness to the environment, not only the Canadian environment but also the global environment.
Fair trade would be fair in the areas of clean water, water quality, surface water, ground water and especially drinking water, which should be a basic human right and not traded away in trade agreements anywhere. I believe in trade that is fair to air quality, which we now realize is a global concern and not just an urban concern. I believe in trade that is fair to biodiversity. We have important biodiversity in Canada, but in Panama it is amazing. It has over 10,000 documented species in Panama, but almost 1,300 of those are found nowhere else in the world. I am concerned that in our rush to promote multinationals, in promoting quick development in Panama, that we will put many of these species and rare diverse ecosystems, forested ecosystems at risk.
Canada has its own endangered species and biodiversity problems. Some of them are very small and very little known and some of them are quite well known, like grizzlies, wolverines and polar bears.
Speaking of polar bears, I am concerned about the entire lack in Bill C-46 and the proposed treaty to do anything about concerns of greenhouse gases and global climate change.
As many of us recognize increasingly that the Conservative government is more interested in protecting the rights and benefits for large multinationals, especially big banks and big oil companies.
In the name of big oil and the Conservatives attachment to it, several decades ago they brought us NAFTA. As we know, the Liberals won a majority election by promising to scrap NAFTA, but they did not keep their word.
Now the Conservatives, through a series of serial bilateral NAFTA-style agreements, are pandering to the aspirations of those large multinationals with which they seem to see as their main client base.
This template is well documented and forecasted in Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine. Every Canadian who can read should read Naomi Klein's book. It is alarming, it is prescient and it should be required reading.
As we can see, the Bill C-46 treaty will move this agenda one step forward. It is a small step, a small country and a small portion of our trade, but it is part of a disturbing trend.
Let us talk about a few specifics.
With respect to the area of market access, an important part of this treaty, Bill C-46 would eliminate all non-agricultural tariffs in to and out of Canada. It would eliminate most agricultural tariffs either immediately or within the next five to ten years.
Let me get back to the environment and some of the wording in the proposed bill.
The bill promises not to weaken environmental regulations. As we know, environmental regulations in Canada are already disturbingly weak, but in Panama they are virtually nonexistent. Bill C-46 proposes to enforce existing regulations. In theory that sounds great, but, again, Canada is already doing little in the area of environmental enforcement. Panama has virtually no environmental enforcement.
In the area of disputes, Bill C-46 proposes to hold consultations, information exchanges. We have seen these kinds of words before in Conservative legislation and we know what kind of commitment to protecting our environment, or Panama's environment or the world's environment for that matter, would entail.
Where is this free trade agreement and other various free trade agreements that the Conservative government has been signing not fair?
Let me talk about some of the problems with so-called U.S.A.-Canada relations. Very few Canadians, and even some members of Parliament, know that the nominal tax rate for large corporations in the United States is 36%. Very few know that in Canada, under the Conservatives, it has been reduced to 18%, half of the U.S. rate.
That has been justified by those who know about it and agree with it. They claim it is an alleged stimulus to investment, but that investment has not occurred in Canada. The moneys from those huge tax breaks to big corporations has moved out of Canada into the U.S. and into various tax havens, including Panama. That investment simply has not occurred in Canada.
I can understand having slightly lower tax rates than the United States, but half the large corporate tax rate? How will we continue to pay for our health care system? How will we continue to invest in the technologies and industries of the future, such as clean energy, sustainable energy?
Let us talk about another aspect of the bad NAFTA agreement and a bad softwood lumber deal.
The U.S. has rolled over our economies in many of the areas that are covered by NAFTA, which is most of our areas. It has exported jobs from Canada. It has exported natural resources in low value-added form, in the form of minerals, trees, cereal grains and other crops and especially in the area of oil.
Under NAFTA, we can either do as we are doing now, which is giving the United States relatively low cost oil, but we have to charge ourselves the same for that oil. We cannot take advantage of our natural asset, sell it at the world price and sell it to ourselves at a reasonable cost that Canadians can afford to foster economic development in Canada.
Canada could choose to be 100% self-reliant on oil and energy, but we export about half of it to the United States and import roughly the same amount from places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Most of the oil that runs our cars and heats our homes in eastern Canada comes from those places. It does not come from our west at an affordable price with a guaranteed supply for the future. Rather it is imported from other places so large multinational oil corporations benefit by exporting those jobs and those litres of oil to the United States.
The government does not believe in fair trade on oil. It does not believe in fair trade on energy self-sufficiency. It does not believe in fair trade on Canadian autonomy.
Let us go back to Panama and why I and my party are inclined to oppose Bill C-46.
Panama is a well-known source of drugs. It is a well-known tax haven for those wealthy multinational corporations and wealthy tax-avoiding Canadians, whose interests the Conservatives seem to be placing paramount.
It seems this is a new opportunity for the Conservatives, with the passive support of the Liberals, to export lost tax dollars, low value-added resources and hundreds of thousands of jobs: manufacturing jobs, real jobs, productive jobs, jobs that can support a family, jobs that can support the Canadian health care system.
The Conservative initiative in Bill C-46 is one more new opportunity, it seems, in a small, symbolic but worrisome way, to sabotage Canadian regulations, autonomy, health care and Canadian labour standards. The labour agreement here is not in the treaty itself; it is a side agreement. The side agreement has no effective mechanism to protect our labour rights, not to mention the labour rights in Panama.
The side agreement on the environment for this Panama treaty will unfortunately continue the degradation of the natural environment not only in Panama, but probably will help to continue the stagnation of dealing effectively with our environmental degradation. It is a side deal with no teeth.
Let us talk about tax havens. In 2000 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, blacklisted Panama as, “An unco-operative tax haven”. In 2008 Panama was one of only 11 countries with no tax sharing information.
I would like to ask a large question, much bigger than Panama, much bigger than Bill C-46. What is happening to our Canada under this Conservative government?
In looking at the past Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, if one liked Mulroney, then one would love the current government. It is moving faster and more effectively to undercut the core of Canadian values, jobs and autonomy.
We have half the large corporate tax rate in Canada than what there is in the United States, 36% versus 18%. We have a huge growth in Canada, in a time of fiscal difficulty, of banks, big oil, their executives and a variety of speculative traders.
Canada has a huge growth in unemployment, especially in real full-time jobs. Those are not the part-time, or underground jobs. Those are not the jobs of people scrambling to survive after they have given up trying to look for real jobs, which are not even reflected in the statistical figures anymore. These are the kinds of jobs that will support families, mortgages and a university education. The quality of life that Canadians have come to expect for decades is eroding. We have a huge loss in Canada of our middle class.
The Conservatives have been doing a wonderful job of distracting Canadians, distracting the media, and distracting the House of Commons with wedge issues. There was a huge one last week. Wake up, Canadians. Wake up, parliamentarians.
As I said, Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, does a good job of documenting the blueprint for this plan. If members have not read it, I urge them to read it. It documents the right-wing agenda, which is clear. It is as clear as Das Kapital. It is as clear as what was in Mein Kampf.
I would like to recommend another book, called The Spirit Level. The Spirit Level is by Wilkinson and Pickett. Wilkinson and Pickett are epidemiologists and statisticians, and The Sprit Level is full of graphs. It does not sound very interesting, does it? However, it is fascinating.
The Spirit Level documents scientifically what many of us have known for decades, which is that trickle-down economics is baloney. Wilkinson and Pickett, in The Spirit Level, have taken the figures and facts from the United Nations and other data sources for all the developed wealthy countries of the world and have shown clearly that the best countries in the world to live in are the Scandinavian countries. When it comes to health, happiness, fairness, equitableness, crime, and prisons, the United States heads the list of the worst developed country in the world in which to live.
They do a wonderful job of showing how that is highly correlated with the gap in income in those countries. Those countries that have a reasonable gap in income between the bottom 20% and the top 20% are happy, healthy countries. They are the Scandinavian countries, some of the European countries, and Japan.
On the other hand, countries such as the United States, Portugal, and others have a huge gap and a growing gap.
Where is Canada in that spectrum? Canada is right in the middle. We are halfway between the Scandinavian countries and the United States in terms of happiness, welfare, and quality of life, and we are also halfway between those countries in terms of the spread of income.
My question for this Parliament, for Canadians, is this: Do we want to drift or be driven, as is happening now, closer to the U.S. greed-based model, with its excessive gaps in income, or do we want to move back toward the Scandinavian model that has done such a good job of providing employment, wealth, happiness, and security for Scandinavians?
The last thing I would like to say is that Panama is less than one-tenth of 1% of our trade. It is pretty minuscule. In 2008, we had a trade surplus. We exported $128 million, and Panama exported $21 million to Canada. It has been going down since 2008, though. In 2009, it was $91 million and $41 million. The trend throughout Latin America has been that the balance-of-trade deficit is getting worse for us.
As we make hard decisions in this act, over how many months and years and coming elections, I hope we will give real consideration to how we get back to fair trade rather than alleged free trade and to how we get back to a Canada that has values based on a middle class and full employment.
