Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
We are aware that many witnesses have been before this committee previous to us, so chances are you've already heard some of the things we're going to say today. However, we believe it's worth reiterating some of the arguments around this issue.
FOCAL has a rather unique take on discussions such as this one, and for three main reasons. First and foremost, we do have a certain expertise in trade and development--and the linkages between those two things--through the research we carry out in-house and the research we outsource to many different sources in Canada and throughout the Americas.
The second thing that gives us some kind of expertise and justifies our presence here is our definite, profound, intimate, in-depth knowledge of the region. Our subject matter is the Americas. We work intensely throughout the region, the hemisphere. Colombia is one of the countries where we focus a lot of our attention.
The third reason our presence today is somehow justified is that FOCAL plays the role of a forum, a convenor of all the different positions, all the different takes that surround a particular issue, including one that has proven to be so divisive as this one. A good example of this last role is that we very recently had a visit with the vice-president of Colombia, Francisco Santos. We had the opportunity of having an event to which we invited all the different sectors that have opinions or are stakeholders in the negotiations of a free trade agreement between Colombia and Canada.
Let me begin by saying something rather obvious: a trade agreement is a trade agreement, period. It is not a panacea that is going to solve, once and for all, all the maladies and problems of the country. It is not the solution for the development problems of the country, for the human rights problems of the country, or for everything that goes wrong in a country. In consequence, a trade agreement can be blamed only for the failures that are attributable to a trade agreement and can be praised only for the benefits that derive strictly from a trade agreement.
I'm going to digress for a second. It's all about lowering barriers to trade. This was relatively easy to do when it was only a matter of tariffs. But that part of the road has been trod already, through multilateral agreements and the WTO. Now we move into an era where trade agreements are more complex, and this has two clear implications. First, it's more difficult to showcase the direct links between the trade agreement itself and the direct, positive impacts it can generate. Second, due to that increased complexity they are a more difficult sell. There are expectations that are not going to be met on the one hand, and there are critiques that have little or nothing to do with trade itself that are set against the potential agreements.
Having said that, one thing a trade agreement can do is open opportunities for many other complementary policies and beneficial impacts within a country--in this case, our developing partner, Colombia--when we take the opportunity of a trade agreement to enable the possibility of these other things happening.
Much has been said about trade agreements tending to lower things to the lowest common denominator. One could argue that's quite the opposite. Through a trade agreement, and in this case through the side agreements in labour and the environment, one can say that certain industries and companies would be there with or without a trade agreement, ones that it would be very difficult to hold accountable for their practices in a different country. Now, in the case of Colombia, we will be in possession of the legal tools to hold them accountable to corporate social responsibility practices, to environmental good practices, to labour good practices. And this, quite to the contrary of lowering things to the lowest common denominator, raises the standard. It's an opportunity that is not...you can't say it's only due to the trade agreement; the trade agreement presents us the opportunity to do that, just as it presents opportunities for improving many other areas that have to do with the rule of law in general, with cutting red tape in some of the bureaucratic processes, with competitiveness and capacity-building--many things that directly benefit our partner country in this case, but that we have to say do not happen automatically.They're not an automatic consequence of a trade agreement. They have to be achieved.
The trade agreement, I repeat, presents us with the unique opportunity to help them achieve these other things—complementary policies that are necessary to do this, many of which Canada has a great deal of expertise in. If we are going to really commit to doing this and really commit to a strategy of the Americas, we can and should contribute with the development and implementation of all these hosts of complementary policies.
In the specific case of Colombia, yes, there have been decades of conflict and there have been atrocities committed by all actors involved in the conflict, but the real victims—the Colombian people caught in the middle, in the crossfire of this thing, those who have been displaced—are the ones who are most likely to benefit once all the right sets of policies are in place, not thanks to the trade agreement but through the opportunities that arise from the trade agreement. When all those things are put in place, these are the people who will benefit the most, particularly when all the steps in the right direction have already been taken by the current Colombian authorities. We can go into what I mean by taking the right steps in the right direction and what the specific policies of the Uribe government are that allow us to make this statement.
The other thing, and this is critical, is that we're talking about some of the most resilient democratic institutions in the whole of South America, so resilient, so based on sound foundations, that these institutions have resisted five decades of conflict. That today is a conflict far removed form any political or ideological confrontation, such as it could have been subject to once upon a time. It's a matter of the institutions of a legitimate government of a legitimate state confronting the threat of armed, organized crime, terrorists, and drug trafficking—the lot.
Last but not least, then, we believe that Canada has the obligation to support the democratic government, and the trade reasons are valid in and of themselves, but our concern for the well-being of Colombians and for human rights in Colombia is definitely the most powerful argument for why we should indeed go ahead with this trade agreement.
Thank you.