Foreign Affairs Committee on June 2nd, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Trottier.

We're going to move over to Mr. Garneau for seven minutes, please.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you all for your testimony. Please don't think me rude. I only have seven minutes so, if I interrupt you, it's because I have many more questions to ask.

I'll start with Ambassador Suarez Davila. You mentioned a letter from the Prime Minister dealing with the subject of visas. I was not personally aware of this. I'm wondering when this letter came and what specifically it said.

[Francisco Suarez Davila]

This was raised after the issue—

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I'm aware of the background.

[Francisco Suarez Davila]

The letter basically said—I almost know it by heart. It was really an opener of the relationship because it basically said that the government had taken the decision, more or less, to eliminate visa requirements for a very large number of Mexican citizens.

In the next paragraph, what does that mean? It is substituting the visa requirements for the new system, which is the eTA. Why is it for a large number of citizens? Basically because this very large number of citizens entails something like 10 million. Nine million Mexicans already have a U.S. visa, and about half a million have a Canadian visa, so that, in the universe, is quite large. This will come into place at the end of March.

As I mentioned, the thing we have to work on is that Mexico at present belongs to the soon-after group. The first group is present visa-free countries, of which there are 50. For us it does present the problem that you first have the 50 visa-free countries, some of which have very limited relations with Mexico, and Mexico, who is your third-largest trading partner, will be in the next group, called the soon-after group, which is Romania, Bulgaria, Brazil, and Mexico. We don't want to be in the soon-after group because we don't know how soon after it will be.

When the budgetary decision is taken, then we can—

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

You say this will come into effect next March or the letter came in March?

[Francisco Suarez Davila]

No, the letter was sent already.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

It was sent in March. Thank you, Ambassador.

Mr. Dillon, you mentioned possibly one of the things that could happen is a North American standard for fracking, which I think is a good idea. It's not only something that doesn't have a standard, but I think there are lots of misconceptions about fracking as well.

Here in Canada, of course, we don't have the same approach in the different provinces. As you know, there are moratoriums in certain provinces. Should we start by coming up with our own standard within Canada before we deal with the United States and Mexico?

[John R. Dillon]

Yes. That's in fact what the industry is working on right now, a standard. They have best practices on things like disclosure of what's in the fracking fluids. But yes, it is—

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

That is under way. Thank you.

Mr. Jacobson, is the United States ever going to go metric?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[David Jacobson]

When I was a kid, back during the Lincoln administration, they used to teach us about that and say that we had to learn all those things because any day now it was going to change. Honestly, I do not see it coming any time soon.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

You realize that you, Liberia, and Myanmar are the three countries in the world that have not gone metric.

[David Jacobson]

It's good to have such good company.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I want to bring up a point. In 2006 I was on a panel of the Government of Ontario. It was on transboundary air pollution, and it was an international panel with Americans and Canadians. It dealt with something that is part of our reality, and that is that the weather patterns do not respect borders.

In this particular case, it was a lot of airborne pollutants carried from the Ohio Valley that made their way up to southern Ontario. I was staggered to realize that there are billions of dollars in impact, not just to things like acid rain but also to the health of people who have breathing difficulties, to agriculture, and others.

To be fair, let's also point out that there are weather patterns that go the other way as well.

Is this something that should be taken up? You've talked about environmental issues, such as common pricing of carbon and things like that. What about the fact that we do export pollutants to each other on occasion?

[John R. Dillon]

I'm sure Ambassador Jacobson has a thought on this as well, but as I'm sure you know there is an existing Canada-U.S. Air Quality Agreement that needs to be strengthened and enforced. I don't know the exact status of it, but it is under negotiation.

The air quality is actually improving in southern Ontario. Part of that is due to the fact that there's less coal being burned in U.S. utilities in the Midwest. Part of that is because there's less coal being burned in Ontario, or no coal anymore, and also improvements in vehicle emissions and other sources as well.

But yes, there's more work to be done on that, for sure.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

It's something that I was on with the Government of Ontario, but I was not aware of any federal level initiatives, because it's more than only Ontario.

[John R. Dillon]

I'm sure the ambassador dealt with this during his time. There is an existing Canada-U.S. agreement.

[David Jacobson]

We've chipped away at it one piece at a time. What has tended to happen over the last few years is that on the same day, as a result of a lot of groundwork together, similar regulations with respect to auto fuel efficiency requirements and a variety of other things get announced by Canada and the United States. That is the way it has gone. But I agree with you completely. We breathe the same air, we drink the same water, and none of this respects a line that's drawn on a map. One way or another, we have to figure out how to work together. It's one of those issues that is going to only grow in importance.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

Last week we had a witness who—getting back to the TPP—said that it's not a well-kept secret that Mr. Obama or the current administration would like to supplant NAFTA with the TPP. Now, you had a similar question asked and you seemed to view it as two things that will continue to live in parallel. Is that really your feeling?

[David Jacobson]

I read that testimony and I'm not quite sure where he divined that information. I've never heard that before.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

You've never heard that before. Very good.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Garneau.

We'll start our second round, which will be five minutes, with Ms. Brown.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all of you for being here.

Ms. Dawson, it's nice to see you again. We talked about having a conversation when you were coming to Mississauga, but unfortunately we're still going to be in Ottawa, so that conversation isn't going to work. It's nice to have you here.

To the chief executive council, when you put your report together, I see you focused a great deal on skills and jobs. All of you have talked about regulatory issues, but in the conversation today we really haven't talked about jobs and how we find credential comparisons. We have the problem in Canada, for goodness' sake. We have provinces in which everybody has their own designation, and it's constitutional. I'm not sure how we get past that, but right now in Canada we have 447 different organizations that are credential-granting organizations. If you're a teacher in Ontario, you can't move to Manitoba and be a teacher in Manitoba without getting your licence in Manitoba.

First, what commentary do you have on this and how we approach it between the three countries? Are there areas where we could take one or two occupations and start chipping away at those, so that we can start some pan-North American recognition of skills in order to start more labour mobility between our countries?

I don't know who wants to start, but I simply put that out.

[Eric Miller]

Yes, we did focus significantly in the paper on jobs and skills, and I note that next week the provincial ministers responsible for the Agreement on Internal Trade are meeting. This is something that should be a very important topic of discussion, because you have the mutual recognition issue in different provinces and then you also have the “scope of practice” issue. We put out a report on this, which says that in Ontario, if you're a massage therapist, you require a licence, and you don't in Alberta.

One thing we've seen in the North American context that has worked, although it's slow, is that the associations have gotten together. The architecture associations in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico worked. It took them seven years, but they ultimately got agreement of mutual recognition about what an architect is and how architects can be certified and can practise in the various countries. It doesn't deal with the admissibility issue, but if a Mexican architect were hired to work on a building in Winnipeg, they would simply have to get entry into Canada to do so, as anyone would when coming to work here. They wouldn't have the question of whether their credentials are recognized.

The only way really to get there is to do this painstaking process of trying to get the credential-granting organizations to talk to each other, to agree on a common nomenclature of what means what in the way those requirements are granted. In the internal trade context, I thought that one thing we could do, for example, might be to pick up on what we've done with tariff negotiations and take the Ellis chart, which lists all of the different credentials, and use it as a basis to say we're going to get to a common framework.

But there are many other things we can do. We talk about, for example, training. It's very hard to get people from companies that produce across North America to one location for training. Each individual has to apply. We've suggested that a company running a training course can say, “Here is the list of the 40 people who are coming to Mississauga to participate in this training course” and that CBSA be required to come back within five days and say yes or no. They may say, “These 38 are fine, but we need to look at these other two”, but at least you can have a batch application and a reasonable expectation about when you're going to receive information back.

What you've seen in many practical cases is that it takes much longer to get the visa to come into Canada to work at doing the training than it does to do the training. That doesn't make any sense, and people aren't out spending money at bars and restaurants and hotels and other facilities in Mississauga, so they tend to go to Las Vegas.