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

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

I note that the hon. member finished up there. Unfortunately, I had already risen and his last few sentences might not be on the record.

I want to remind the hon. member of the use of members' names in the House. There was one instance of that, and we kind of let that go, but there was a second one, so just watch that you do not use them, particularly for prime ministers and other members who are included in speeches from time to time and in comments and questions in the House. I thank the hon. member for that.

We will go to questions and comments, the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that was certainly a fascinating way to spend part of my afternoon listening to the Liberal fiction of the open process that never existed until the American Democrats finally stood up on their hind legs and defended Canada, and we came back and got a better trade deal than the Liberals were willing to sign off on. They were willing to sign off on anything they were so desperate to please Trump.

What concerns me is that the future of the economy is data. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that except the Prime Minister because the Liberals traded away our data rights under chapter 19. The National Research Council has said that Canada's economy is turning into a data cow for Silicon Valley. Under chapter 19, we cannot establish our digital sovereignty, even though that is where the EU is going. We cannot tax the big Facebook, Google and Amazon giants, even though they are getting a completely unfair trade advantage. We cannot go after them for the harmful content that has been generated through the algorithms of YouTube and Facebook, because the Prime Minister is more willing to bow down to the Google and Facebook lobbyists than even Washington is.

Why is it that the government cannot come clean, stand up and explain to Canadians why it sold away our digital sovereignty?

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, first, I want to correct my hon. colleague in terms of the consultation period. I was part of that study and heard over 10 witnesses speak. One of the common themes was that virtually everyone said that their industry was represented in these renegotiations. They said they were heard. In fact, the indigenous communities and business community from indigenous peoples said that this was the first time they were ever consulted so thoroughly on a trade agreement. Their interests were taken into account and they had nothing but great things to say.

Similarly, for digital content and copyright provisions, there were consultations. Canada has always been foremost in protecting our digital content, copyright provisions and our cultural sovereignty. Thousands and thousands of jobs will be protected with the cultural provisions we have kept in this and we will continue to maintain.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was thoroughly amused at the member's ability to define the success of this agreement by what Canada did not have to give up, rather than by the new access and new advantages that we gained under it.

Colleagues may recall that the Prime Minister said this was going to be a win-win-win. In other words, Canada was going to have a very clear win out of this. By any standard, by any measure, this is a worse agreement than we had before, although we are told now that a new NAFTA is better than no deal at all.

The member referred to all of the consultations that took place with stakeholders, industrial stakeholders and the aboriginal communities, but he failed to mention the members of this House on the opposition side who represent more than half of the communities across this country. Can the member tell us in this House that in fact the opposition was thoroughly consulted the way some of the other industrial stakeholders were consulted, yes or no?

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I think the answer is yes. I think that former leaders of that party were part of the actual negotiation. The former leader was part of it and a former prime minister has been quoted saying it is a really good deal.

Let me quote what some of the other Conservative premiers in this country have said, such as, “A signed USMCA trade deal is good news for Saskatchewan and Canada." The Conservatives' wonderful Jason Kenney, the Premier of Alberta, said he is “relieved that a renewed North American trade agreement has been concluded.” Former leader Rona Ambrose was part of the negotiation. I think I have already quoted a former prime minister from the 1980s who concluded the first free trade negotiation and NAFTA and said that it was a “really good job”.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to talk about this important trade deal.

I will be sharing my time with the member for Red Deer—Lacombe. He is a good friend and I would not want him to miss out on an opportunity to give the Alberta interpretation of this deal.

I do not want to be critical of the previous member or some of his interpretations of the deal. When I look at a trade deal, whether it is an economic trade deal or a sports deal or whatever, there are only two trades I can think of that are similar to this trade deal. One was when the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, and the other was a trade in 1992 to my team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, when the Calgary Flames were kind enough to give us Doug Gilmour. That is where we start, if we want to see what kind of a trade deal we have here.

David MacNaughton, the Prime Minister's appointed ambassador to represent us in Washington, said at the outset of the deal in November 2016, “I think any agreement can be improved.” He got that wrong, and he got it wrong big time. Another point he made that day was that Canada would have at least one clear demand, free trade in lumber. If that was the hill to die on, the Liberals were blown right out because they did not get anywhere on that.

In my riding of Huron—Bruce, which I have had the honour to represent for many years, depending on the location, it is an hour to an hour and a half to the Blue Water Bridge, right across from Port Huron, on the Sarnia-Port Huron border. We are right along Lake Huron. We have tremendous agriculture productivity, cash crops, edible beans and livestock of all sorts. We also have a tremendously strong manufacturing sector. We have the world's largest exhaust manifold manufacturer as well. We also have Bruce Power, which is the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

Trade to the United States is very important to us. Fair trade with NAFTA and the USMCA deal is obviously very important to us.

Other things that were not dealt with in this deal, which I think is very unacceptable, are the buy America provisions. We would have expected those to be dealt with. As well, there was no firm commitment from the government, and I will speak specifically to the very loose border in regard to CBSA. Many commodity sectors in Ontario have long-standing complaints against the leaky border, whether it is the dairy sector or the poultry sector with spent hens. There are many other topics that were not dealt with.

We should think about where we were five years ago. We had the then minister of international trade, we had Gerry Ritz, and we had the then prime minister agreeing to a monumental trade deal, the deal of the century, with TPP, which included the United States and Mexico. I can remember when that deal was first agreed to. It was right in the middle of the 2015 election. In spite of that, we had agricultural sectors saying that it had set up their sector for a generation. I know there were exact quotes at that time.

TPP is a perfect example of a trade deal, the one we concluded with the United States, where there is give and take. Agriculture groups could look at it and say that they had given up a little but, to the benefit of the entire sector, there were huge gains and, by the way, there was certainty with some of the biggest markets around the world for a trade deal.

If we look at what happened, some things could not be helped. There was the U.S. election and the United States pulled out of the TPP. I do not think anybody could have predicted that when the deal was first agreed to, but that is what happened. We entered into a deal, and the Prime Minister told Canadians he would get us a better deal, but he did not do that.

Let us look at some of the other deals. One of the best deals we did was between Canada and South Korea. That had so many huge benefits for Canadians, including for Canadian agricultural producers in my riding with edible beans. It was phenomenal, including for beef and pork. The tariffs were coming down. It gave us a tremendous opportunity. The TPP with Japan is going to make a big difference.

I have heard a number of members from the Liberal side talk about chapter 19 and chapter 20, but I go back a number of years when we had a dispute with the United States about country-of-origin labelling. This had a huge impact on our livestock sector in Canada. We did not go through chapter 19 or chapter 20. We went through the WTO. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association made note of that in its committee briefing that we do not even use that. It has not been used for 15 or 20 years.

I will agree that softwood lumber did have a one-time payoff perhaps, but in agriculture, it has been zero. The one thing the Liberals keep saying is a big deal in the agriculture community is peanuts. Peanuts is a great segue into something else I would like to talk about.

The U.S. PR paper talks about what the Americans gained versus what we gained. The U.S. gained access to dairy. The U.S. gained access to poultry. The U.S. gained access to turkey, eggs, and on and on. What did we get in return? Somehow we got a little dairy and I will see that when it happens. Apparently our big gain from the U.S.A. on agriculture is on peanuts and peanut products. I can think of all the peanut farms in my riding. What a thing. I know at the U.S. agriculture committee they were laughing about what a great deal they secured for American farmers. At home we cannot say that.

If we look at the beef sector today in Ontario, it is in crisis. The Liberal government pulled the processing licence for Ryding-Regency in Etobicoke and that has caused ripple effects in the beef sector in Ontario for years now. The Liberals did not have to pull it. They could have extended it past 90 days.

Then we look at what has been done through CFIA on transport rules. The Liberals thought they had a deal and time to do it, but CFIA went in and said here is the deal. Another deal recently done is on processing mainly eastern Ontario and some Quebec cattle in auction facilities like Brussels in my riding, Cookstown and others where they used to have great arrangements for processing cattle with their horns and other components. It was humane, safe and all of a sudden CFIA comes in and says they have to be held for so many days. There is no capacity for that. Now it is on farm.

The government has not been fair to Canadian farmers and farm producers. The agriculture minister was in Teeswater in the summer to make a big $70-million announcement for Gay Lea in my riding that was specifically trying to address schedules 6 and 7 products in the dairy sector. This huge investment to try to add value and create value for dairy farmers and the processing sector, and this deal knocks the legs right out of it, with 50,000 tonnes reducing to 35,000 tonnes. The price is not set by Canadian processors. The price is set by the U.S. If we want more access, guess who we have to go through? Uncle Sam. How could we do a deal like that?

I look back at 2019-20 and ask what the big change is. I used to work in the manufacturing sector. In the auto sector, saying that 40% of the Mexican production by whatever year it is, they will earn $16 an hour when assemblers are earning $7.40 an hour and auto parts employees in Mexico are making $3.40 an hour. What a joke. It should be 100% have to make that. We have hard-working auto parts workers in my riding who go to work every day through the snow, and produce a product that would trade around the world on fair price, fair labour, fair benefits. This deal does not do it.

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

Mr. Speaker, the auto parts workers in Canada love this agreement. It makes a lot of additional provisions for them, but I want to talk about agriculture, too. There are increases in access for refined sugar and margarine. The member said agriculture is small, tiny, and he might have used the word “peanuts”, but there is huge trade between Canada and the United States. Sixty-three billion dollars is not small. That has been preserved. There is $4.6 billion in trade with Mexico. I have a letter dated March 3 from the vegetable and fruit producers of Canada, who said that because of free trade, their trade is up 396%. They further stated:

Therefore...on behalf of a deeply integrated North American membership, we strongly urge [all parliamentarians] to...ratify this Agreement [in order] to facilitate a strong fresh produce industry for generations to come.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the peanuts part was actually peanuts, but on sugar, I think of the food guide. I understand there is trade between Canada and the U.S. on sugar, but as for the food guide, some of the private members' bills in the last Parliament were about sugar and sugary drinks, the issues we have with obesity and type 2 diabetes. I do not think the government should be holding out its big promise on this trade deal and talking about all the sugar it is going to ship to the U.S. I think there is enough sugar down there. We should be focusing on the big things.

On the auto side, I do not think what we did in the deal for the auto industry is that exciting. We need to build more automobiles in Canada for Canadians. How many pickup trucks do we manufacture in Canada right now, compared with how many we buy? We have to do way better and we have to demand GM, Ford, Dodge and other companies build their trucks in Canada and make the investments here. We have the talent and the labour. Let us build them here, not in Mexico.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in his speech, my colleague stressed the many breaches in supply management and the precarious situation facing supply-managed producers.

Let me just remind him that, on two occasions—in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union—the Conservative government was the first to create breaches. However, since I subscribe to the idea that we learn from our mistakes, I wonder whether my colleague would not agree with me that the best way to ensure that these situations do not happen again is to have a bill that guarantees and protects supply management in all trade negotiations and treaties.

Would my colleague be prepared to support the initiative of the Bloc Québécois, which introduced such a bill?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Mr. Speaker, no offence to my colleague, but he should go back to the 2015 quotes when we agreed to the TPP. He should look at what the Canadian dairy farmers and the supply-managed sector said. They said this was the best deal they could come up with and that it set the sector up for the next generation.

The next chance we will have to try to square this away with the Americans is if they ever try to get into the TPP. That is the only chance we will ever have to get anything back from them. When that opportunity comes, and we know TPP is too good for them to stay out of because they cannot get all those bilateral deals, we have to be tough and we have to fight. We have to say that the entry is going to be pretty high for the Americans to get TPP 2.0.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I sit on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, which heard from witnesses about this agreement. It generally ranged from lukewarm to strong support. However, there is a lot of concern, especially in the supply-managed sectors, with the threshold limits that were established for the exports of certain dairy products. I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that, because the witnesses at committee said that was an unprecedented ceding of sovereignty, the fact that Canada would negotiate away our ability to export to other countries and to have the United States dictate that.

I would also like the member to comment on the fact that we had to rely on the goodwill of the Democrats in the United States to improve this deal when the Canadian government was prepared to sign it in the previous Parliament with none of these improvements present.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is unprecedented, and here are a couple of numbers. In egg production, 1.6 million extra eggs are going to rise to 10 million extra eggs in six years, and it is 1% more on top of that per year for the next 10 years. When we think about that, they also have their WTO allocation. This is 20 million eggs. It is a huge number. It is very concerning in the long term.

Believe me, these farm groups may come to committee and say nice things, but they are being nice. If we talk to them in our offices or over a coffee, they have a whole different vocabulary they use when they describe the current government and the trade deal they have been dealt.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to throw some kudos out to my colleague for his speech. He is a long-serving member of this House of Commons, as am I, and it is great to see him back here standing up for the people in his riding. This is my first speech in the House of Commons since the last election. It is not my maiden speech by a long shot, but I want to thank all of the good people in central Alberta and the riding of Red Deer—Lacombe for once again putting their trust in me and sending me back here with one of the best mandates that I have had.

I am not trying to say it is all about me. For those around the country who might not understand what we are going through, in Alberta the last election was basically a referendum on whether Alberta feels like it is a valued and equal partner in this confederation, and we are having those conversations as we go on.

It is also a good segue into whether Canada in the new NAFTA, or the CUSMA, is a full and equal partner in the North American trading space. I would suggest that we could have done better, but let us go back to where this all started.

Back in November 2016, Donald Trump was about to become the president in the fall elections of that year. Our Prime Minister naively humoured Donald Trump's assertions that NAFTA needed to be ripped up or renegotiated.

Rather than defending Canada's interests and saying something to the effect that the North American Free Trade Agreement was working very well for Canada, or that it was a long-standing agreement that had benefited all parties in the agreement, he willingly committed Canada to renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with the President and with the American administration, should Donald Trump take over the White House, without fully understanding the ramifications of what he was saying. Other evidence suggests that the Prime Minister does not understand the ramifications of the things he says.

That is where we are. That is where this all began. There was nobody in Canada asking for this. I do not believe there was anybody in Mexico asking for this. Have there been irritants? Have there been long-standing issues with NAFTA over the years? Yes, because no deal is going to make everybody happy. We are not starting from that context, but that is where we are now.

Because we took that weak approach at the start, to pretend that everything was going to be nice if everybody would just naively follow the Prime Minister's approach and assume that everybody in the world was going to be nice and treat Canada nicely, we ended up in a situation where Canada is a net loser with the new agreement that we have, compared with where we were in 2015.

Let us talk about where we were in 2006. My colleague from Abbotsford, who was a cabinet minister from 2011 on, and I were both elected in 2006. Mr. Speaker, you are part of the class of 2006 as well. When the member for Abbotsford and I came to the House in 2006, Canada had trade agreements around the world that we could count on—

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

One hand, five.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Was it one hand? I thought it was six, but it is five. The member for Abbotsford, as a former trade minister, knows more about this than I do, I will concede.

Mr. Speaker, we could count the number of countries that Canada had trade agreements with on one hand. After 2015, we had trade agreements with 51 countries, through the previous Harper government from 2006. We negotiated these agreements, and we started the negotiations with a minority government. We did not start with a position of power in Parliament. As a matter of fact, we had 123 Conservative MPs and we were government. That is only two fewer than we have right now in opposition.

We were able to launch a series of trade negotiations that would insulate and cushion Canada's economy and spread our influence and trading relationships around the world with the trading compact of Norway and a few countries, Liechtenstein and so on, a small group in Europe; the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, with the other European Union countries; the Pacific partnership trade agreement and a trade agreement with Korea. We have so many trade agreements now, I cannot even remember what they are all called.

Thankfully we have those opportunities to take advantage of now, because we were so dependent upon the United States before, and because of what we have just lost and given up. What did we give up?

I represent a large rural and urban split now, but when I was the MP for Wetaskiwin it was primarily a rural riding. I have the largest concentration of dairy farmers in Alberta in my riding. We gave up another 3.6% in the value of that supply management. More importantly, the dairy producers that I am hearing from in my riding are not satisfied with how that compensation is being reallocated.

Dairy farms in Alberta look a lot different from dairy farms in other parts of the country, and their needs are different from what the needs might be in other parts of Canada. The government should have had a different approach in meting out and making amends for that loss of market access.

The most egregious part of this is that the United States now dictates what countries Canada can export to outside of this agreement, when it comes to our supply-managed sector. We have ceded our ability as a nation to bargain for ourselves, on behalf of our producers and farmers, for who we can trade with outside of the three countries in the agreement.

For example, if we wanted to have an agreement trading poultry or dairy with Korea, and we wanted to change the nature of that relationship, we would need the permission of the United States of America to do so. That is actually the ceding of sovereignty, and that is an unfortunate and dangerous precedent.

The aluminum industry in Canada did not get the same deal as the steel industry. The steel industry got a pretty good deal. I think the steel folks are fairly happy, generally speaking. They got the escalating scale on the amount of steel that has to be poured in Canada or in North America. That is a good deal. This is a good thing for our industry.

Why could we not achieve the same thing with aluminum? What was the issue with that? I ask because Canada is in a good position when it comes to being able to smelt and pour aluminum. We did not gain anything there. We lost over $4 billion in trade in the auto sector alone.

Now I want to talk about softwood lumber. My friend from Abbotsford would remember this. Back in 2006, with a minority government that only had two more MPs than we currently have in opposition, we were able to resolve the long-standing softwood lumber dispute. We put $4 billion, which we got back from the United States, back in the pockets of Canadian businesses and companies that were wrongfully charged those tariffs. For years, we had peace on the softwood lumber front.

Where are we today? In the context of renegotiating this new CUSMA agreement, we still have outstanding issues with softwood lumber. A majority Liberal government for four years, with the full confidence of its own caucus, I am assuming, even with the bromance with President Obama for the first year, could not resolve these long-standing trade irritants with softwood lumber. As a result, rural Canada is again under siege, with jobs lost and mills closed outside of our major urban areas as a direct result of the government's inability to get good things done for the people of Canada.

I would like to use my last minute to talk about all of the good things that this trade agreement has and all of the new things it has gotten.

I am done.