I'd like to thank the committee, and the chair of the committee in particular, very much for having us here today on behalf of the 350 or so members of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers.
As the chair already indicated, with me today is Nick Milanovic. I'll be giving the first half of our brief presentation, and Nick will be doing the second half.
I'd also like to highlight for the committee that in the audience today is Nadja Drost from the Canadian Council for International Co-operation. The CCIC tabled a brief and made a presentation to the committee during the last hearings discussing the CA4 trade agreement.
The Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers submitted a 28-page brief to the committee in June, which I trust has been translated. I think you all have copies. You'll be happy to know that we won't be going through the entire brief this morning.
I'll first briefly outline some of the concerns we have about the existing labour protections in hemispheric trade agreements that Canada has negotiated. Then my colleague Mr. Milanovic is going to review with you some of the concrete and hopefully productive recommendations we have made to potentially negotiate a trade agreement that takes labour rights seriously.
It is obviously the case that increased liberalization of trade in the Americas has significant and important implications for the rights of workers, not just in Canada but throughout the Americas, and in this particular case Central America. In Canada there is a general concern about the downward harmonization of labour rights that Canadian workers could experience, and arguably are experiencing at the moment, as the result of increased liberalization of trade with, for example, Mexico, Chile, and Costa Rica.
It has been our experience that there continue to be real problems with the actual enforcement of labour rights in many Central and South American countries--not all, but many. That's not to say there aren't often good labour laws on the books in Central America or South America--and we're talking here about Central America--but the problem frequently is enforcement. So if you're going to look at actually preventing a downward harmonization of labour rights in the Americas, which can be occasioned by an increased liberalization of trade, you need to look at the substance and enforcement of labour legislation.
Of course, because labour rights and trade rights are connected, in 1993 when NAFTA was first signed it included as part of the package the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation, known colloquially as the NAFTA labour side agreement. We've now had that agreement for 13 years, and I think we know to some extent what its results have been.
It's important to remember that back in 1993, when the NAFTA labour side agreement was first signed, it was widely seen as a potentially bold new experiment in enforcing labour rights on a transnational basis. It would go some distance toward alleviating the concerns of workers and labour rights organizations that free trade would mean downward pressure on wages and on terms and conditions of employment. Skeptics in 1993 viewed the agreement as being merely window dressing, that it was there to placate the opponents of free trade and provide them with some comfort that free trade would not lead to the dire predictions many foresaw at that time.
Now, 13 years later, both Nick and I have litigated, pursued, and filed cases under the North America Agreement on Labour Cooperation in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It's been our experience under this agreement that the skeptics have been proven to be correct. The current agreement has substantial flaws that make it not a viable model to pursue in the trade agreement you are now discussing.
The reasons for that are lengthy and set out in the brief. But in a nutshell, the problem with the labour side agreement model is that the enforcement mechanism doesn't work. The process is too slow and cumbersome, and there are no useful remedies that can be achieved against countries or employers who refuse to enforce substantive labour rights in their countries. That's partly because countries throughout the Americas thus far have refused to attorn to any kind of transnational jurisdiction when it comes to enforcing labour rights. They simply refuse to give up sovereignty over these issues.
The model in the NAFTA labour side agreement has been followed, more or less, in all of the other hemispheric trade agreements that have been signed: the Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement; the Canada-Costa Rica Free Trade Agreement; the U.S.-Central America free trade agreement, known as CAFTA; and the U.S.-Chile agreement. The variations within those agreements are set out in our brief, but they all more or less have the same flaws.
On the message we want to send to you here today, we understand there will likely to be some sort of labour side agreement or labour rights provision in the CA4 trade agreement. If you're going to include labour rights in a trade agreement, do it seriously. Take the job seriously and correct the mistakes that have been made in previous agreements.
In our brief we attempted to provide you with eight recommendations, which we ask you to consider, on how to meaningfully enforce labour rights in these agreements.
I want to turn now to my colleague Mr. Milanovic, who's going to review very briefly some of those recommendations.