Bill C-4 (Historical)

Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement Implementation Act

An Act to implement the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican States

This enactment implements the Agreement between Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican States, done at Buenos Aires on November 30, 2018, as amended by the Protocol of Amendment to that Agreement, done at Mexico City on December 10, 2019.
The general provisions of the enactment set out rules of interpretation and specify that no recourse is to be taken on the basis of sections 9 to 20 or any order made under those sections, or on the basis of the provisions of the Agreement, without the consent of the Attorney General of Canada.
Part 1 approves the Agreement, provides for the payment by Canada of its share of the expenditures associated with the operation of the institutional and administrative aspects of the Agreement and gives the Governor in Council the power to make orders in accordance with the Agreement.
Part 2 amends certain Acts to bring them into conformity with Canada’s obligations under the Agreement.
Part 3 contains the coming into force provisions.

Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today. I have been listening to the hon. member across the aisle for Winnipeg North. In Saskatchewan, there is a radio show that is on every day, the John Gormley show. It has a frequent caller, and his name is “Conspiracy Kevin”. I believe we have our own version of “Conspiracy Kevin” in the chamber today. We have heard of the Conservative hidden agenda and many not-so-accurate comments coming from the member for Winnipeg North.

When the Deputy Prime Minister went down to the States in the middle of the new NAFTA negotiations and blatantly made fun of the President of the United States at one of their talks, does the member think that helped or hurt our industry in the trade deal going forward?

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Order, please.

Before we go to the hon. parliamentary secretary, members should not be doing things indirectly that they are not permitted to do directly. I appreciate that the member was trying to skirt around that and I give him full marks for attempting to do so.

We will now go to the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, let me give a conspiracy for the member opposite. There was a prime minister whose name was Brian Mulroney. He is the original author of the trade agreement. I am sure members on that side will know him, as they applaud. Having seen them applaud that, I wonder if they would applaud his remarks when he said that this is a good deal for Canadians.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I always find the parliamentary secretary's speeches quite entertaining, but there were so many factual inaccuracies there I just do not know where to start. I am on the committee as well and have listened to the witnesses.

One of his comments was really concerning to me. He said that this is going to be a better deal for the auto industry. That is what the Prime Minister said and that is what the Deputy Prime Minister said during the election, but the government's own numbers on this agreement show that it is going to be a $1.5-billion hit to the auto industry, which will decrease production about 1.7%.

When the Liberals took office, there was an agreement called the trans-Pacific partnership that was ready to be signed. It was the new NAFTA, which was a plus $4.3-billion improvement to our GDP, and with this agreement, C.D. Howe Institute said there is going to be a negative $14-billion hit.

How can the member stand here and tell workers in Oshawa, where our plant just closed, that it was a good deal for auto workers, especially given the numbers that his own government took until the very last day to tell Canadians were valid on the economic impact studies? How is a $1.5-billion hit a good deal for automotive?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we could talk about the new origin rules that are within the agreement, which I believe will protect many of the workers into the future. It is important we recognize the loss of any jobs in any industry in Canada is something that we are very much sympathetic to, and we try to do the best we can to provide support.

Having said that, if we draw a comparison to what we have been able to do in the manufacturing sector, particularly in Ontario, we see that the manufacturing sector took its greatest hit during the time of Stephen Harper, when hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in that industry. I will compare our record to the Harper record on the manufacturing industry any day. There are protections for auto workers within this agreement.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Abbotsford, who has a long history in trade. During his time as trade minister, 51 agreements were completed. Therefore, I am honoured to share my time with such a financial wizard of trade.

North America has a trade history. If I go back to the Blackfoot Confederacy and my riding, the nations traded west through the Bow River corridor into B.C. They traded south into Wyoming. They traded into Montana. Therefore, we have had international trade going on in North America for some time with the indigenous people.

The Hudson's Bay Company showed up and traded across the country and exported all over the world. We are an exporting country. We survive because we export. We are tied to it. We have to trade.

Back in 1854, before we were a country, reciprocity with the U.S. was an issue. There was a reciprocity agreement in 1854, because we were dependent on trade with the U.S.

In the times after Confederation, with Macdonald, Borden, Mulroney and Harper, we continued to build trade agreements because we knew we were an exporting nation. However, there were challenges in those decades. As the U.S. became more intertwined in the later decades of the 1890s into the 1930s, we had the Smoot-Hawley agreement. The U.S. realized trade deficits with Canada were really detrimental to it. Therefore, it began to build trade tariffs, one after another, over those next 40 years.

Following the Second World War, Canada was constantly going back to the U.S. for exemptions to deal with trade under the Smoot-Hawley agreement, which was very protectionist. We were begging for exemptions. We did get the Auto Pact. When Nixon became president, he decided the U.S. was done with exemptions for Canada. He left us the Auto Pact, but that was the only thing he left us.

The next decade began with the building of NAFTA. We realized we were so intertwined economically with North America that we needed a better deal than what we had. As that grew, Mulroney was elected. Who did he use as a spokesman to build the NAFTA agreement across Canada? Premier Lougheed of Alberta. He was the gentleman who went across the country and the United States to get support for this agreement and to get people to understand how good NAFTA would be for them. It was an incredible experience for the premier of Alberta to show what with North America meant, not just for Alberta but for the whole country.

Once the NAFTA agreement was in place, it worked for decades. Now we are faced with one that has its challenges.

Several times today, members have mentioned the dairy industry and what it has lost in the new agreement.

Aluminum will be an interesting challenge. We know what has happened in Mexico. It is not as good as the deal we have for steel. We have a great aluminum industry in the country. I do not know why we did not work more to protect it, because it is such a green industry, both on the west coast and in Quebec. It is one of the greenest industries we have. It should have been protected more. It is an example of a green industry.

The cattle industry still has issues with cross-border trading. Moving live animals is a problem. Washington State is now looking at COOL, which is country of origin labelling. It is already developing some legislation. Trump likes that kind of legislation. Our cattle industry is very concerned because hundreds of thousands of live animals and products move back and forth in North America. COOL was very detrimental, but we managed to get it out. Now it is coming back. We have to deal with that. Our agriculture industry is absolutely paranoid about the cost of that.

We did not deal with softwood.

There is something else interesting in my riding. It is the only sugar beet industry left in Canada. We produce sugar beets in Canada. My grandfather was involved in bringing that industry to southern Alberta from the United States. He brought it up and we have irrigation. The sugar beet industry is very strong in my riding. It employs up to 200 people a year when those sugar beets are harvested. There was access to the U.S. market under the previous NAFTA, and the sugar beet industry was very concerned about what might happen. It was protected and it is still there, so that is a positive piece under the current NAFTA.

Somebody here mentioned the Wheat Board, and I cannot resist that because that was a problem. It put shackles on western Canada as far as trade for our prairie farmers. I have very successful farmers in my riding who knew that they could trade better than the bureaucracy of the Canadian Wheat Board. They would load up their trucks and take them across the border to deliver a Canadian product, because they knew they could trade better than a bureaucratic Canadian Wheat Board. Those people went to jail. They spent months in jail for driving across the border delivering a Canadian product that was wanted in the United States for trade. Canadians went to jail because they wanted to trade, but that is what we do. Some of those people continue to be leaders in their communities today. That jail record did not keep them from doing the good things they needed to do. It is just an example of what we believe about trade. We believe in western Canada how good it is, but it is trade all over the country.

Most recently, for example in Newfoundland, people have learned how to develop the eggs that come out of sea urchins for the Japanese market. We trade all over this country because we are tied to it.

This agreement is done and it has been signed, but there are things that need to be fixed. There were concessions made, one after another, to get it done out of fear of what Trump would do to us. Out of that fear, we got an agreement. It is not an agreement that is going to be fixed easily, but it is something that we need to do.

Do we agree with trade? Do my constituents want trade? Absolutely they do, but they want certainty. They need to know where those markets are because we are traders. We are entwined with the U.S. and Mexican markets. We have to trade. We need to get our products to market. The deal will be done and we will support it, but there certainly are losses in this one.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages (Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency)]

Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate the member's speeches, especially because he is so sensitive to indigenous people, as I have noted in the past, and I really enjoy that. Perhaps the member could comment briefly on the fact that, for the first time, indigenous rights are in this agreement. I am sure he would agree with that.

More important, the member talked about the green aluminum industry. Anything he could add as to what his party would do on green industry would be great.

While he is thinking of the answer, I just want to mention that he said there should be improved protection for aluminum, but there is a huge increase in protection for aluminum in this agreement. The regional value content in cars increased from 62.5% to 75%. In the past, there was no protection on aluminum parts purchased by automakers. Now, 70% must be North American and 7% of the core parts of a car must have 75% regional value, and of course a number of those parts have aluminum. This can be reviewed and improved any time.

If the member could talk about green industry and his party's plan, that would be great.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's input in the House and his speeches as well. He represents a great part of our country.

Regarding green industries, and agriculture is one of them, a United Nations committee stated that we need to remove cattle from the prairies because they are destroying our environment. I could not believe that one. The cattle on the prairies are a critical piece of our environment. They replaced the buffalo. Without those cattle on the prairies, we lose our natural prairies and we lose the green environment. It is so wrong that people in other parts of the world who do not understand the environment, do not understand that cattle do the same thing today as the millions of buffalo that roamed and worked the prairies. We have an industry that needs trade, and it is the cattle industry, but they make the environment greener on the prairies.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, as the NDP trade critic, I have been following the debate very closely.

Conservatives mentioned a couple of issues multiple times. One is the lack of an economic impact assessment, or the late delivery of that document, getting it only a day before the conclusion of the committee's study. A second concern, and I think a legitimate concern, is about having to give notice to the United States of negotiating an agreement with a non-market country, which really means China.

The NDP was successful in negotiating some policy changes with the government, namely that the government would be required by its own rules to table an economic impact assessment with the ratifying legislation, that it would be required to give three months' public notice, here in Parliament, of an intent to negotiate with any country, and that it would give notice of its negotiating objectives.

That is sound policy, and it helps in addressing some of the concerns about the process for this agreement by making public the notice that the U.S. would get anyway and by ensuring that economic impact assessments would be tabled with the ratifying legislation.

Would the member comment on those provisions?

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member brings such depth to his questions and interest in this House. I always appreciate it when the member stands up to address the House.

The member talked about transparency, and transparency is the issue. We are dealing with the coronavirus. I am going to go a different way on this, but members will understand why in a second. We have had a party dealing with this, but it has been dealing with it in a very closed fashion.

When the Conservatives dealt with SARS, was it just the committee of the cabinet that was dealing with it? No. The leaders of all opposition parties were included at 10 o'clock every day. It was transparent and it was dealt with as a team, because those things need to be dealt with by a team.

This is the same as what the member was saying about dealing with a team. We are dealing with the coronavirus and we are out here having to ask questions about what is going on. If the Liberals would include the opposition, as Conservatives did with SARS, we would have transparency and much better information sharing. We would then be able to make better decisions.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to engage in this debate again. What I am going to speak to is a story of betrayal, incompetence, weakness on the part of the Prime Minister, hubris and recklessness. It is a story of opportunity lost because we did not even have to engage in this negotiation the way the Prime Minister engaged in it.

Our Prime Minister assumed that because President Trump said that he was going to tear up NAFTA, somehow he needed to reach out to him and say that he gladly would renegotiate this agreement. Anyone who knows anything about the American trade system knows that the President cannot unilaterally tear up a trade agreement. He needs to have the consent and the approval of Congress.

Think about this: 35 of the American states have Canada as their number one export market. Show me the representatives, senators and governors from those states. Do colleagues think they will ever agree to tear up the old NAFTA? Of course not, but our Prime Minister marched into this negotiation and said, “President Trump, what do you want from us?” That is how it all started, and then President Trump said, “Well, I've got this huge trade deficit with Canada.” That is fake news.

The truth is that our trade with the United States is virtually perfectly balanced. One month it will be one way, a couple of billion dollars, another month the other way. The reality is that our trade is as perfectly balanced as any two countries could expect. The President's target was Mexico, but somehow our Prime Minister did not figure that out.

The Prime Minister said that he was going to bring back a win-win-win. It was three wins, one for Mexico, one for the U.S. and one for Canada. Did we get a win out of this deal? By any reasonable measure and standard, we lost, and we lost big time. Let me explain why.

What are the wins? We did get a digital economy chapter out of it, because back when NAFTA was first negotiated we did not have a digital economy. Today it is ubiquitous, so it makes sense to have a chapter for that.

We did synchronize some of our intellectual property rules with the United States. That is okay.

We raised our de minimis amounts so that people can come across the border with a higher duty-free limit, but there were no real market access gains for Canada in this agreement, except for maybe a little bit of sugar. That is about it, honestly.

Earlier Liberal speakers defined success in this agreement by what Canada did not lose. They said we were able to defend things. We were able to preserve chapter 19. What a great win. We preserved what we had before. That is not my definition of a win. My definition of a win is that we gain something from the United States, not just security or simply a marketplace that will not be disrupted because we do not have an agreement.

Let me now talk about the concessions we made. Can members imagine that after five years of negotiations our Prime Minister agreed to President Trump's demand that there be a six-year sunset clause? In other words, in six years either we decide to carry on, or the deal falls dead. That is the first time Canada has ever done that, by the way.

The aluminum industry in Canada was not provided with the same protection against dumping, primarily from China, that the United States got, so we sold out the aluminum industry.

Then there are export caps on the auto industry for parts and vehicles being exported.

We conceded Canadian sovereignty on milk pricing. Never before have we done that, where we said, “President Trump, if we want to change our milk pricing regime, we will come to you, cap in hand on bended knee, and beg you for permission to do this” to defend our supply management system.

We did the same thing with our sovereignty with regard to negotiating other trade agreements. Can members imagine that? We agreed with Donald Trump that if we ever want to negotiate a trade agreement with a non-market economy like China, we will have to come to him and ask him for permission to do so. Sly fox that he is, he has already negotiated his own deal with China, at least a phase one deal, so he does not have to come to us cap in hand, but we have to go to him that way to try to compete on a level playing field with China. Do members think he will ever approve that? Of course not. We got snookered.

It gets worse. We conceded double the amount of new dairy access that the Americans will have to our market than our Conservative government had negotiated under the TPP. That is a massive failure, and it gets worse. The Liberals actually imposed export caps on our ability to export value-added milk products. For example, in cheesemaking in the milk industry, there are by-products that used to be washed down the drain, but we had some smart Canadian companies there. One of them is in Abbotsford, British Columbia. It is called Vitalus, and we had Phil Vanderpol from Vitalus at committee. We asked him about the export caps.

The U.S. wanted us to limit our exports of these value-added unique products not only to the United States, which might have been fair, but also to other countries all around the world. We said to Donald Trump, “You know what? We are not going to be able to export beyond those cap limits.”

I asked Mr. Vanderpol at committee if he got a chance to talk to the minister and the trade representatives about this. He said that yes, they had a meeting, and they told him in no uncertain terms that export caps were not on the table. When the agreement came out, guess what? Caps had not only been on the table, but had been negotiated away by our Liberal government.

That is the betrayal part of this agreement. That is a betrayal, and Mr. Vanderpol was very upset about how his industry had been sold out by this Liberal government.

I will now talk about the process that the government undertook to apprise Canadians of what this deal really meant in economic terms.

The United States did an economic impact assessment, and I have it here. There are 400 stinking pages of it that explain the impact it will have on the U.S. economy, and it is a positive impact. The assessment says that the U.S. made major gains against Canada. Ours was a 73-pager, and it did not even compare the old NAFTA to the new NAFTA; it compared a universe without NAFTA at all to the new NAFTA.

Fortunately, there is an organization in Canada that did the work that this Liberal government failed to do, and that is the C. D. Howe Institute. It actually compared the impact of the new NAFTA to what the old NAFTA delivered for Canadians in economic terms, and it is a sad story. It is a story of failure on the part of the Liberal government. The C. D. Howe Institute concluded that Canada is going to sacrifice about $14 billion of economic activity every single year going forward. That is a $14-billion GDP hit that we are going to take as a result of this agreement. Is that a responsible agreement?

The Liberals used to say that no NAFTA was better than a bad NAFTA. Now they are saying that it is better to have a new NAFTA than no NAFTA at all. They do know what they are talking about.

They talk about win-win-win. They talk about delivering a better deal for Canadians. At the end of the day, after we look at this agreement, and I do have some experience in trade, we see this is a big fail for Canadians.

I wish we had better news for Canadians, because we can do so much better. The previous Conservative government would have never made the concessions that were made in this agreement. There are things in this deal that Canada has never agreed to before, yet this Liberal government made those concessions. That is a sad story.

It is a story of failure.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, in listening to the member opposite I would like to remind him that inside the House for the very first time, and maybe the member across the way can correct me, we have an agreement in which the Bloc, the NDP, the Green Party and the Conservatives, including the member who just spoke, are going to be supporting the bill.

If the deal is that bad, can he explain why the Conservatives never achieved what this government has by getting virtually unanimous support for a trade bill, something the Conservatives were never able to get?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is amusing. Every time the member stands I have a good chuckle at the way he is able to stretch the truth. I want to remind him it was the Liberal government of the day that voted against the original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The Liberal government members of the day said they would vote against the original NAFTA and when they were elected, they suddenly changed their minds. They had a conversion on the road to Damascus. These are wannabe trade-meisters.

What the Liberal government has left this Parliament with is no options at all, except for one. We are supporting the agreement, but by any stretch or measure, this is a worse agreement than we had before. The C.D. Howe put an exclamation mark on that assessment.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, is my understanding correct that a future Conservative government would make no concessions on supply management in a future trade deal, whether Canada-U.K. or another deal?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, what I can assure the member of is that a future Conservative government would never sell out the industry the way the Liberals did under this agreement.