Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again to speak to the question of how Canada trades with our counterparts in the United Kingdom. I think I would do well to begin by talking a bit about what we are not debating here. We are not debating whether it is a good idea to have a trade relationship with the United Kingdom; everybody is on board with that. Obviously there is a long-standing trade relationship with the United Kingdom going right back to the very origins of Canada.
The question is what the terms and conditions will be for our trade with the United Kingdom. I appreciate very much the extent to which some of the debate so far has focused on the question of the investor-state dispute settlement chapters in trade agreements, because these have been a long-standing irritant for many Canadians and which the NDP has been very proud to give voice to over the years.
The member who just spoke went through the list I know many MPs, including many New Democrats, have gone through in the past of all the ways in which Canada has been taken advantage of and lost money and opportunities to implement good public policy as a result of investor-state dispute settlement clauses. When we are talking about the terms of trade, just as any business would, we want to talk about at which the terms and conditions of trade make sense or when we are paying too high a cost for a particular kind of benefit.
The fact of the matter is that investor-state dispute clauses have had a chilling effect on good public policy, whether in respect to the environment, workers' rights or public health. When we consider the impact and what Canada has received in return, these clauses have have never been worth it and are not worth it now.
I have had the honour of sitting on the trade committee in this Parliament, and what we have heard in one breath from groups is that they are very keen to have Canada sign the next free trade agreement, but then they turn around and talk about all of the problems with the trade agreements and why they are not getting the market access they are so excited to get on paper but are not realizing, including the cattle industry under CETA, which is very frustrated not to get the market access it wants. Canadian manufacturers, despite being advocates of free trade, will tell us they are not able to take advantage of the opportunities that exist for them on paper through these deals. A recent report shows that Canada's trade deficit with Europe has grown considerably since CETA was signed.
These are all things that we eventually have to take a look at and ask if these deals are working rather than our just inhabiting the kind of ideologically blinded position of, frankly, the Liberals and Conservatives. There has been a consensus between those two parties and the mainstream media in Canada for a long time now that whatever is in a trade agreement is good.
I have had opportunities to ask business representatives at committee what empirical evidence, not just currently but in principle, could ever convince them that a free trade deal might not be in Canada's best interest, and on more than one occasion I have heard them say there is none. There is none, so as long as we call it a “free trade agreement”, as long as there is lipstick on that pig, they are going to think it is a good idea. It does not matter if it is a pig. As long as we put the right lipstick on it, they are going to go full bore, if the House will forgive the pun.
What New Democrats have been trying to make a case for over the years, which one would think we would hear from a prudent business person, is that the terms of trade matter. What do we have before us? We have a so-called trade continuity agreement, which is sometimes referred to as a “transitional trade agreement”, which of course is an untruth. I have made that case here before.
I just want to go back to kind of the slow train wreck that this process has been. I recall in the last Parliament that we were debating CETA, and of course at that time there was a pending referendum in Britain about whether it would remain a part of the European Union or leave it.
We thought, on the New Democratic benches, that this made a difference in whether CETA was a good deal or not. Given that 40% of Canada's trade with Europe was with the United Kingdom, we might think that whether the U.K. was in the deal or out of the deal would matter. We were told that New Democrats do not understand trade or business. Again there was that same theme that it did not matter what was in the deal. Apparently it did not even matter who was a party to the deal: As long as it was called a free trade deal, it must be a good thing. We did not even need to know what was in it. Who cares? We were just being told by business magnates that this was a good idea, so sign us up. Where do we sign? It was ridiculous.
Nobody was pretending to predict the outcome of the Brexit referendum. We were just saying that it mattered how the referendum would go and that maybe using time allocation to force the ratification of CETA before we knew whether the United Kingdom was in or out did not make sense. We were told no, we have to ratify it right away. All of that was signed, sealed and delivered before we knew the outcome of the referendum, and then, of course, the referendum did not go the way may people hoped. It went the way many other people hoped, and the whole Brexit saga kicked off.
The disadvantaged position that Canada found itself in was in having already signed up for a deal, and not long afterward, the fundamental terms of that deal were already changing. It was clear for all to see, before Canada ratified that deal, that there was a very real possibility that we would find ourselves in the position that we ultimately did.
What happened next? Not much. A couple of years ago, there were some initial conversations around trying to get to a deal. There was a lot of fanfare about how excited the Liberal government was to be one of the first to sign a deal with the U.K. It did not end up being one of the first to sign a deal with the U.K., of course, because it walked away from negotiations for over a year. Then it was all this eleventh-hour stuff that we have seen from the government on many other files.
The government finally decided to come back late last summer to the negotiating table. What we got was a carbon copy of an agreement, and it was quite misleading. All along what we were being told was that the opportunity for a substantial agreement had passed. The opportunity had passed to try to have a model agreement for progressive trade, not just one to hand over the keys to public policy-making to multinational corporations. The opportunity to have a trade agreement with terms and conditions modelled on the needs of everyday people and workers, rather than just multinationals, had passed.
We ragged the puck until that opportunity passed us by, but we were told not to worry, because we would just have a transitional deal. I think any reasonable person would have thought it was a temporary deal, a stopgap measure or something that carried on the status quo for a certain period of time so that eventually we could get back to the table. We would then know that we were going to have either something new and different and hopefully better, nothing at all, or maybe an agreement to extend things.
This agreement turns up, and no meaningful consultation happened at all. We know that this is true because we have asked people at committee if they were consulted about this deal, and they told us they were not, some very clearly and loudly, others somewhat sheepishly, but nobody has claimed that they were well consulted when it came to this agreement.
The government, quite disingenuously, has tried to pretend that the consultations for CETA were somehow adequate for this agreement. The CETA consultations were for a deal that was going to include 26, 27 or 28 different member states; this is nothing like a bilateral deal with the United Kingdom. In a bilateral deal with the United Kingdom, there are clearly a very different set of considerations. The possibilities, risks and rewards are different from what there are in a deal with the entirety of Europe. That is a point that the Liberals did not appreciate in the last Parliament with the pending Brexit referendum. The same mistake occurred again when they said that the consultations for CETA were essentially good enough for a deal with the United Kingdom. It is that same blindness that we see.
However, that notwithstanding, the Liberals do not recognize that much of that consultation on CETA also happened—in fact, the entirety of it happened—when the U.K. was part of Europe, so even the nature of CETA has changed considerably. Therefore, to tell anyone that the CETA consultations—when companies and others were giving their feedback on a trade agreement with a Europe that included the United Kingdom versus a Europe that did not—were also adequate for a bilateral deal with the United Kingdom is just false.
We find ourselves now with a last-minute deal to perpetuate the terms of an agreement that I do not think were very good in the first place, frankly. The agreement was trumped up on a supposedly temporary basis, and lo and behold, when it is announced, no, it is a permanent agreement. When this agreement goes through, this is it. These are the terms and conditions of trade between Canada and the United Kingdom unless a new agreement is started. These terms do not expire at any time.
We tried at committee to at least amend the enabling legislation so that something would have a hard deadline, but that did not go through. The government was very much opposed to that. We now find ourselves in a deal that was made for an entity that does not exist anymore, a European Union that included the United Kingdom. It is dictating the terms of trade with two important trading parties: what is left of the European Union and the United Kingdom. We have a deal that was never conceived for either of these trade arrangements that is going to dictate the terms of trade with both. It does not seem to me to make a lot of sense. I am not a business guy, but it does not seem to make a lot of sense to me.
It seems to me that Canadians ought to have had the opportunity to have a conversation about this agreement and to have been consulted about it, except they were not. The government went ahead and signed this permanent deal, and as far as I am concerned, it had zero mandate to do so, because as the Liberals talked about it in the lead-up, it was to build a mandate for a temporary agreement, not a permanent one. However, when they finally had the reveal, it was a permanent agreement. They were saying not to worry about the fact that they had pissed away all that time that could have been used to consult, that could have been used to negotiate a deal that was actually made to fit the entity that we are trading with, like a real bilateral trade deal and not a carbon copy of a multilateral deal. They said, “Do not worry about it. There are three reasons we are going to get a new deal, and you do not have anything to worry about, Mr. Blaikie, thank you very much.” Okay, what are they?
There are some issues around rules of origin for certain products that recognize the European supply chain in order to facilitate getting U.K. goods into Canada. Fair enough. That is one reason the U.K. might decide that it wants to come to the table, but I do not know that it is enough on its own. I do not know that anybody does, frankly.
The other reason, which I would get a kick out of if it were not such a serious issue, is that the Liberals say that the way the United Kingdom cheese producers are able to trade cheese into Canada is under some World Trade Organization TRQs right now, and those are going to expire, so the United Kingdom is going to want to come to the table. For what? Is it to get access to the Canadian cheese market that it does not currently have?
Government members have sworn up and down many times at committee, in this very House and anywhere anyone will listen to them that they are not going to sell out dairy farmers even one more time and that dairy farmers should not worry, because there is no Canadian market share on the table. Well, then, why would the U.K. come back to the bargaining table to get a different deal if the reason it is supposed to be coming back is to get market access for cheese?
It is one or the other. Either it is a leverage point to get the U.K. back to the table, which very clearly implies that there will be concessions on dairy, or it is not a reason for the U.K. to come back to the table. Which is it? We do not know. I have asked the question, but I have not had an answer. It would be nice to have that before we vote, but I will not hold my breath.
The final reason is that there is a good faith commitment in the agreement. It is not legally binding. It does not say a new agreement has to be signed, it just says it is going to commit. That is great. That is very nice. That is how things start and that may well turn out to be a success. I cannot say that, but what I can say is that there may well be another government in Canada before then, preferably a social democratic one. We are working to make that happen and I would like to see it happen. Maybe it will, maybe it will not. There may well be a new government in the United Kingdom. It may be that the two governments, even if they are the same governments, sit down and start talking about what a bilateral deal would look like. Just one of the parties, because this is a permanent agreement, has to decide that it cannot get a better deal.
Maybe this deal is not perfect for either side, but the sides just have to feel that they cannot get a better deal and throw in the towel. We all know that trade relationships and considerations can change on a dime. We just lived that over four years with the Trump administration in the United States. There is nothing to say that something like that, or even a far less extreme case of that, might come to pass between Canada and the United Kingdom going forward, such that one or the other party decides that it is not content with the terms of trade.
Look at what CETA has been producing for Europe. Canada's trade deficit has doubled under that agreement. If things are going that well for the U.K. under this agreement, it may decide that it is good enough, thanks very much. We have all heard that in order for the U.K. to accede to the trans-Pacific partnership, it needed to have a permanent trade agreement with at least one of the parties. This does that. It was not supposed to do that. We have been told from time to time that the U.K. will be incentivized to make a new agreement with Canada because it needs to have an agreement with at least one other country in order to get into the TPP, but this does that. There is no clause in this agreement that says it does not count for the purposes of a permanent trade agreement that could get the U.K. into the TPP.
The fact that this ended up being a permanent trade agreement, as opposed to a temporary stopgap measure, does not mean a short timeline. It does not mean inherent and cyclical uncertainty for Canadian or U.K. business. It could have been a three-year timeline. It could have been a five-year timeline. It could have been whatever timeline was chosen for those two governments to get together, hash it out and feel pressured to get a deal. Instead, the option taken was to absolve future governments of that pressure and hope for the best. I just do not think that is good enough, particularly when, if we look at the trade continuity agreement itself, the infrastructure for CETA is already there.
The agreement itself is very short. It is about five pages. Fully 20% of that agreement is about how to have a mechanism to keep the investor-state dispute settlement clauses of CETA alive. A lot of Canadians are concerned about those provisions, and they have a right to be. Canada has been the biggest loser on the international stage when it comes to having to pay out to multinationals for trying to make good public policy. What a farce it is that governments should have to back down from good public policy, apologize to some multinational company and then pay them damages. What a farce.
We know it is, because the Deputy Prime Minister has stood in the House, in Parliament, and said as much: that she is really proud that there are no longer any ISDS provisions in CUSMA. Why was fully 20% of this TCA dedicated to keeping ISDS clauses alive and who was asking for them? We do not hear from Britain that they are part of its global trade agenda, or that they are a priority to negotiate it into the deals that it is doing around the world, so who is asking for them? Why is it that the Liberal government swears up and down it is proud that ISDS clauses are out of NAFTA or CUSMA, whatever we want to call it now, and why has so much effort been expended to keep ISDS clauses alive in this agreement that was never envisioned for a bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the United Kingdom?
