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

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have a point of order. With all due respect, and I know that you are doing an extremely capable job, but I believe that the member does have an opportunity to respond to that question or comment. Does she not?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

I am learning as I go. Thank you for the reminder. My apologies to the member for Windsor West. We will give a few seconds to the member for Kelowna—Lake Country to answer the comment.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member opposite for allowing me to answer the comment. I will be brief.

One of the differences we can talk about here is that, when we are looking at the United States, its opposition was involved. The Democratic Party was actually involved in different points of the discussion, and we have not been involved. That is a big difference between us and the United States.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to intervene in this discussion. I represent Windsor West, which is right on the Detroit border in the United States.

Our peninsula Windsor-Essex County has been a trading component of our nation from its creation, from our first nations that were in the area and still are to this day, and we are working on reclaiming some of their rights for many reasons of colonialism, to the French settlement, followed by the British settlement. It is the oldest European settlement west of Montreal. I represent Sandwich Town.

About 40,000 vehicles, 10,000 of them trucks, per day traverse through my riding. The 40,000 vehicles not only bring as passengers visitors, but up to 10,000 doctors, nurses and other health care professionals who work in the Detroit region daily.

It was the founding of the logging industry originally, but most recently it has been the hotbed for the auto industry and manufacturing. Trade with the United States has been part of our way of life. It is our people who are interchanged, so the Canada-U.S. relationship is very important because families live on both sides of the border.

I have an American aunt. This is a normal thing: we have Canadians and Americans in our family units and our working units as well. Even our sports and culture are very much there.

We see American flags in my riding, but we will not find any fiercer Canadians, especially when it comes to issues like being against the war in Iraq, where Windsor and other areas fought to keep us out of that war.

I remember the days of debates here in the House of Commons, when Canada was going in that direction and we pulled ourselves back from that. A relationship is knowing when to tell a friend when they are wrong. Knowing when to intervene is something is the strength of a relationship, not a weakness by any means.

This agreement is important, no doubt. We have to look at the previous agreement and what takes place. There are some important things that need to be clarified in the debate. First of all, this agreement coming back to us is better and improved because the Liberal government did not do its job. Liberals did not want to listen to Tracey Ramsey, the former member for Essex, who forced and focused on the issues of the environment, dairy and labour that should have been in the original agreement.

In fact, there were Liberals who would say certain negative things all the time, but this bill is coming back in this chamber for this vote because Liberals did not do their job. They do not want to have to be here. They would have loved to have dealt with this the first time, but the reality is Democrats were able to take Congress. When they took Congress, the Democrats had the opportunity to fix the deal, and they did.

I have heard in the chamber, many times, members pushing the government to support Democrats to get this improved, when they did nothing. They stayed down on it because it is a Trump-Trudeau deal. That is the reality of this deal in itself. We now have—

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. As the member is one of the deans of the chamber, I am sure he is very much aware that he is not supposed to use the names of members of the House. He should be using titles.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

Could the hon. member for Windsor West correct the record?

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I did say that, so I retract it.

I will continue to advocate that people need to fix this deal to bring it to an improved place. We have to measure it against what it was in the previous deal. We currently have some serious problems with it.

The original free trade agreement had significant consequences for a riding like mine, Windsor West, and manufacturing in particular. When the free trade deal was signed by Mulroney, the problem was that the manufacturing sector was destroyed. There were 400,000 jobs lost in manufacturing. It was one of the things that was exposed as part of doing the deal.

What we lost under the free trade deal was the Auto Pact. The Auto Pact was a special trading relationship we had with the U.S. for the manufacture and sale of automobiles in the United States, the world's largest market at that time. That built our robust industry. In the riding I represent, the Ford family and others who had factories and plants on both sides of the border invested heavily in Canada because of the Auto Pact.

After we signed the free trade agreement, that special relationship we had was challenged in the WTO by Japan, and it was struck down. Instead of fighting that WTO decision, the Chrétien government accepted it. Since then we have gone from number two in the world in auto assembly to number 10.

This current deal has some higher thresholds for automotive components, construction and assembly, but the sad fact is we are not doing the jobs much anymore, so it does not matter if the quota is raised. That is why, in the absence of a national auto strategy, something we have implored the government to develop, we will have further erosion, concerns and problems.

The original deal was sent by the Liberals to Washington, and the subsequent deal was fixed by people in Washington with respect to labour rights to give us some better protections. However, we have still seen plants close and move to Mexico. We have also seen new opportunities being created in Detroit, two miles across the river. In the Windsor-Detroit region, General Motors just closed a plant in Oshawa and is now building electric vehicles and a battery plant in the U.S.

What is amazing is that the Liberals often brag about $6 billion in auto investments since they have been in government. When they had a super-majority government and support from us and others to do a national auto strategy, they never did anything about it, but they brag about that $6 billion. Most of that was actually plant refurbishment that was being done without them anyway.

If we compare that investment to others, Detroit alone is up to $16 billion of investment. There we have rejuvenation and a fight for jobs taking place, and it affects workers and their families. It is very significant for their future because the new age of automation in auto is here, and Canada does not even have a battery plant.

In our city of Windsor we produced the award-winning Pacifica hybrid vehicle, and the government left it off the incentive list for the new eco rebate program. The Prime Minister came down to Windsor, toured the plant that I worked in, stood on the line with the men and women who were building an award-winning vehicle and asked them to subsidize foreign vehicles for other Canadians. We could get a foreign vehicle from that list, yet the vehicle produced in their own community, which pays taxes into the coffers of the government, was left off the list.

What was unbelievable about it was that because it is multi-passenger, this vehicle is cleaner and greener, and we still had to fight to get it on the list.

Our point for this process is to look at this trade agreement. We need to move it to committee and examine it. If we think we are just going to sign it and all these jobs are going to come, it does not happen like that.

If we look at when we sign all our trade agreements, we often go into trade imbalances. We have significant trade imbalances from many of our deals. We hear all the time about all the jobs that are going to come, but they are never value added and they always come with a big subsidy from the government because there is no plan. That has to change. It is time to fight for our manufacturers.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, my friend and I belong to the Canada-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group and from time to time, we travel together down to Washington to talk to congressmen and senators.

Prior to 2018, Republican congressmen and senators would be very sympathetic to Canada's position. They would make clucking noises of sympathy, but say there was nothing they could do. They were afraid to challenge President Trump. Similarly with the Democrats, they would be sympathetic to Canada's position, but would say they could not do anything because they did not have a majority in either house.

Post-2018, the same visits would yield a lot of goodwill and action from the Democratic congressmen, hence the change in attitude when President Trump went to get it ratified.

It is not really the issue with respect to the Canadian representations. We actually sowed the seeds for many years to get the deal we have today, which is 95% to 98% of what we wanted in the first place.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have enjoyed working with my colleague from Scarborough—Guildwood as we have gone, bipartisan, to Washington to lobby on many issues. I appreciate his work there and I appreciate the opportunity to continue that.

However, the reality is that the deal has to be fixed because the hard work and the backbone was not there to begin with. That is the problem.

We could have pushed it even further and harder had we had some conviction for it. We never saw that in this chamber. We never saw that in the debates. We never saw that in the answers from the Prime Minister. It was always standing down for Trump every single time, whether it was the awkward press interviews the Prime Minister did or in this chamber being asked by different leaders and MPs from all over this country, what always took place was him standing down.

The Democrats stood up to put the environment and labour in the deal. In fact, we met with labourers from Mexico. Tracey Ramsey brought them in. We met with the Mexican workers here and they told us to hold our ground. They did not want to be used and abused anymore for bad jobs. They told us to hold our ground. We should have listened to them.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I noted that when the member for Windsor West was talking about the auto sector, he mentioned that Canada went from number two in auto assembly in the world to number 10.

Over those 30 years, were there any other changes in the global market, perhaps demand in certain countries versus others, that may have also affected that?

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Madam Speaker, it was primarily related to the auto trade relationship, the Auto Pact. We can go back and look at the numbers from that time. The Auto Pact is the significant contributor to the erosion, along with the fact that we do not have greenfield plants.

I hope the member for Kingston and the Islands will support another initiative that affects us along the border, my single-event sports betting bill. We have asked the government to issue an order in council to do it. The Prime Minister and cabinet voted against it last time. Now New York, Michigan and 17 other states are all taking advantage of this.

I do not understand why the government does not move on getting rid of organized crime, protecting casino jobs, bringing in new revenue for education, health and the environment and making sure we can compete in tourism. Liberals can do it with an order in council. In fact, the Liberals gave a private American billionaire a 17-page order in council for him to build a new bridge, but they will not change one paragraph in the Criminal Code to make us competitive with the U.S.

We are doing this with a trade agreement to bring reciprocity. How can we have a situation where the government will not do the same thing for our tourism industry?

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

Madam Speaker, it is with pleasure I join the debate this afternoon on the new NAFTA, or NAFTA .7 as I like to call it. There are a lot of things that we can agree on in this new NAFTA legislation but there are still a lot of questions to be answered. Our job here is to review legislation, to review new agreements as they come forward. People in our ridings sent us to Ottawa to make sure we do due diligence on legislation, and everyone in this room would agree with that.

I have been listening to members opposite. Some of our Liberal colleagues have spoken to this legislation. To quote a member earlier, “We can always do things...better.” We would all agree with that. That is why we need to look at this agreement through a lens. We need to find out what we received in return for the concessions we made to the Americans.

Canada came to the table too late. Mexico and the United States had been negotiating far too long without Canada being represented at that table. This came down to the eleventh hour. The Mexico-United States agreement had moved far beyond where we left off in our discussions and negotiations with our partners in this trilateral agreement. Members opposite made a mistake. Canada was not at the table soon enough and we were not fighting for our industries hard enough.

We do have a lot of questions with this deal going forward.

I grew up on a dairy and beef farm in Rush Lake, Saskatchewan. I have a lot of friends who are still in the dairy industry. The member from Winnipeg said conversations were had with the dairy industry. Representatives from Dairy Farmers of Canada have been here over the last couple of days, and that is fantastic. Our conversations may be a bit different than what members on the opposite side had.

There are concerns with what has been going on and many questions were asked. Dairy farmers feel that the CUSMA negotiations went far beyond dairy market access concessions. The agreement also concedes the equivalent of a worldwide cap on the export of certain Canadian dairy products. It requires a level of consultation with the U.S. on any changes to the administration of Canada's supply management system.

By requiring the Canadian dairy sector to consult with the U.S. on any proposed changes to our system, the government has given up some sovereignty over our domestic and international decision-making. That is a problem for any industry, whether it is dairy, softwood, forestry or the auto industry. Any time a Canadian industry feels like it has given up some of its sovereignty to another country or given up international market options is a problem for any agreement we move forward on as a government. Those are valid concerns. Some of my friends back home in this industry have big concerns.

CUSMA requires any export of skim milk powder, milk protein concentrate and infant formula beyond a specified amount be charged an export charge on each additional kilogram of product exported globally. This requirement goes well beyond what would normally be expected in a trade negotiation. It will affect dairy exports to all countries, not only the signatories of the agreement, namely, the United States and Mexico. This sets a dangerous precedent for future trade agreements for all other commodities, including agriculture.

These are some concerns that we have to take very seriously moving forward. When an industry says this will set a dangerous precedent for other industry sectors moving forward, that should make us pause and take a step back.

I am looking forward to having some of these conversations when this legislation gets to committee so that we can figure out exactly what we received in return for these concessions with one of our more important sectors. What did we receive from the American negotiators after we conceded quite a bit in our dairy sector in the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement? There are other questions going forward.

Dairy farmers are hard-working people. They have no days off. It is 24-7 work. Dairy farmers cannot have a sick day because the cows still need to be milked. We need to make sure that we have the backs of our dairy farmers when we are negotiating these agreements. They do a wonderful job.

Our milk and cheese products are the best in the world. When we move forward, we should do it together to ensure that we have fair trade deals and that the dairy industry knows we are there for it.

We have had a lot of conversations about aluminum. My colleagues from Quebec have done an amazing job bringing forward the issue China sending ingots to Mexico, where they are melted down and can then be considered as North American aluminum. We very much need to have conversations about this loophole to ensure our aluminum producers and manufacturers can have their world-class product be considered ahead of a product being shipped into Mexico, melted down and then sent out for auto parts. That conversation very much needs to be had. I appreciate those members bringing the issue forward.

EVRAZ steel is on the border of Regina—Lewvan, my riding. If steel had that deal, then aluminum should have that as well. This is another thing we should talk about at committee. Stakeholders come to committee meetings so we can have these in-depth conversations and figure out how we can help our aluminum sector going forward. These conversations are best suited for committee.

With the time we are given, a lot of issues can be discussed on the floor of the House, but there needs to be more time to go through in detail some of the concessions we made to our American partners.

To go back to my original point, we made those concessions because we were not at the table soon enough. We let Mexico and the United States go too far down the path of an agreement without our being at the table to have those conversations, having a strong voice there to ensure that our industries were supported and that they knew we were there to support them.

Another industry we fell short on was softwood lumber. Softwood lumber suppliers in northern Saskatchewan have concerns about this going forward. We hope that when we get to committee, some of the stakeholders have those conversations with committee members.

We talked about going fast and going slow. My Liberal colleagues have said that we have not been consistent on what we would like to see. The Conservatives would like to see a strong deal. We would like to see all sectors supported. We would have liked to see a government that did not let this go so far down a path that it had to go on bended knee, begging for a good deal at the eleventh hour.

The Conservatives would have liked to have seen strong negotiations taking place long before it happened. We would have liked to have seen the government bring forward the deal before the middle of December so we could actually look at it. We would have liked to have seen an economic analysis on how this deal would affect all these sectors before we voted on it.

The Liberals have talked about the premiers wanting this deal to be passed to allow for certainty. I would like to know how the 16-year sunset clause will be negotiated. Every six years, there is supposed to be a review. What is the process for that to take place?

The Conservatives have a lot of questions going forward. From our standpoint, as legislators we want to do our due diligence so our constituents, the people who have sent us here, know we are doing our jobs.

I am looking forward to having these conversations in committee and moving forward. I want to be a partner with all parties in this chamber so we can get the best deal for all those sectors. We want to ensure that we have a stronger economy for all Canadians and that there are good-paying jobs in these sectors going forward.

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

Madam Speaker, I have a couple of points of clarifications on supply management. Of course there will be compensation on the quota and we have guaranteed there will be no more in any future trade agreements related to milk and milk proteins in infant formula. The quota number is much bigger than we already produce and export, so it will not have any immediate effect.

On aluminum, I outlined in my speech three different new benefits for aluminum producers. It is not perfect. If a company wanted to bring in aluminum ingots from Mexico, it could not, as 70% has to come from North America. That protection was not in place before. Parts makers could bring it in, but a lot of them get their supply from the auto producers because they can buy en masse and get a much lower price. Therefore, they would be buying from North America.

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

Madam Speaker, I know there have been concessions made in the dairy sector, because we spoke with those groups yesterday. They brought up the infant formula and a few of those other issues and their lack of ability to gain more access to the global market. I appreciate that we will have more of these discussions at committee.

Hopefully, the member opposite will be at committee when the dairy producers of Canada and SaskMilk give their presentation, so he can hear right from the producers how they feel the negotiation on NAFTA .7 went. They do have some concerns moving forward. I look forward to seeing the member at committee for their presentation.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for showing that parties can work together even though they do not always share the same political vision. We are all capable of fighting for our constituents. I am happy to know him, and I congratulate him on winning his seat.

He may agree with me. I get the impression that the Liberals do not realize Mexico is part of North America. Maybe we should bring them a map and explain to them that Mexico is in North America.

Mexico has no aluminum smelters, but is exporting more and more aluminum parts. That is bizarre. It also seems that China is exporting more and more aluminum to Mexico. There might be a connection there.

I would like to work on the same file as my hon. colleague. I am happy to see that the Conservatives and the Bloc can fight for the same people.

When the Liberals talk about the 70% requirement, it seems as though they do not understand what happened. The steel sector is getting more protection than the aluminum sector. For the past two months, we have been killing ourselves to get that message across to the Liberals, and workers have come to see us.

Does my colleague think that the Liberals handled this issue in bad faith or that they just do not understand what they signed?