I'd like to begin immediately by agreeing with one suggestion that Mr. Vosalik has made; namely, the use of our diplomats in Havana to encourage meetings with so-called dissidents, as described by the Cuban government, to make it clear not only to those courageous activists who are trying to push for more freedom in Cuba that there are sympathetic voices.... That's important for their sake, but it's also important to indicate clearly to the Castro regime that these kinds of universal rights are something we care about.
It's my general view—and I stand to be corrected, but I think I'm right in this—that we've had a remarkably good opportunity ever since the government of Mr. Diefenbaker did not do what the Americans did at the time of the Cuban revolution. We maintained our diplomatic relationships with the Cuban government, which I think was absolutely the right thing to do, and we have done so since, of course. But we haven't, in my judgment anyway, matched that kind of reasonable gesture, if I can put it that way, vis-à-vis the new regime with efforts on our part to put pressure on democratization within Cuba itself.
I think we've been too passive. We've accepted the benefits of trade, such as they've been, partly due, of course, to Cuba's inability to trade with the United States. So we've had certain real economic advantages, but I don't think we've matched our advantages with enough pressure in Cuba to improve the situation.
And let me add, in addition to this, if you like, direct bilateral engagement. We've done that recently, as members of this committee well know, in Africa. We did it in South Africa by meeting with dissident people and making it very clear where we stood on human rights issues. So this is not a unique policy towards Cuba. We did it with some efficacy in past African regimes and in certain current situations in Africa too.
The second point I would make is that one of the things that struck me as a very important breakthrough that has not, to my knowledge, got out much in Canadian news is that at the end of last week in the United States there was an agreement between the Bush executive branch of the U.S. government and the U.S. Congress leadership, the Democratic leadership, to now link, for the first time, trade deals with human rights considerations. This is a decisive shift in American policy.
For those who have followed this issue in the last 15 or 20 years—and it was something I was very intimately involved in as president of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development in Montreal—this is an important development.
I'm now going by a PBS newscast I saw on Friday that listed the sort of conditionality the Americans are now going to be insisting on in all trade deals, including some that are being discussed right now—and it has to be written into the deals: the existence of a verifiable right to an independent union, absence of torture, certain UN protocols on the environment, the absence of child labour, and there was another right as well, which I forget.
I would encourage the Canadian government, and I would encourage this committee, to look at this as a potentially—I won't put it more strongly than that—significant breakthrough. As members of this committee will know, western democratic governments have been very reluctant to make a linkage between trade and human rights in the past. I've systematically opposed that policy myself, but I recognize how difficult it is to impose that policy on a bilateral basis, especially with a big country like China. This is hard to do on a bilateral basis.
But it is entirely possible to do it, in my view, on a multilateral basis. If this became part of the new WTO rules, for example, there are mechanisms that are set up for enforcement, for monitoring. So this could be applicable, just as our Czech ambassador has pointed out. This is not a policy unique to Cuba that I'm talking about. It could be effective with Cuba but as a condition for pressuring an opening up and using our trade regime rules with Cuba and being in a position to talk about these conditions as being part and parcel of a “free trade arrangement”.
So that's a multilateral proposal I would make, in addition to the kinds of bilateral activities that our friend the ambassador has talked about.