Good afternoon, members of the committee and Mr. Chair.
It is a pleasure and an honour to have the opportunity to appear before the committee today.
I'm here principally to make some brief remarks, focusing on my experience as a senior official at the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation from 2000 to 2007. I'm less familiar with the particulars relating to the Colombia-Canada negotiations because there's just not that much information publicly available on those negotiations. I wish there were more.
The idea behind the NAFTA environmental side agreement, or any other side agreement, is that to have an even playing field for trade, you need to have an even environmental playing field, so that countries will not use weak environmental laws or weak enforcement to attract the economic benefits of trade. Without a level playing field, you have a race to the bottom.
The CEC, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, was a bold step back in the early 1990s. It was really the first time—at least in North America—that governments decided to open the trade and environmental arena to closer cooperation and expanded opportunities for public participation. The biggest innovation in that set of agreements was the supposed teeth of the environmental side agreement, a citizen submission complaint process and a government-to-government dispute resolution process.
I have submitted to the committee a detailed article that I have just had published in the The Environmental Forum in the United States, with my views on how those mechanisms are not working.
I want to tell you, though, a quick story that I think is symptomatic of what's happened in the NAFTA experience, and you should be aware of this as you consider additional trade agreements and additional environmental side agreements.
We had a case at the CEC filed by a man named Angel Lara García. He filed that complaint in 2003. He was the neighbour of a small shoe parts manufacturer, and all he knew—because he was illiterate, blind, and almost deaf—was that the smells from that factory were making him and his family sick. He got tired of the lack of action from Mexican authorities in controlling the problem, and he finally found out that he could come to this North American commission to try to get a review of the lack of enforcement.
We filed a submission in 2003, and we completed a final factual record, our detailed report of the investigation, last November. Normally the governments are supposed to allow publication—because the agreement calls for a vote to allow publication of those reports—within two months. It took until May 30, 2008. It took six months in this case, and when the CEC went to contact Mr. Lara García, they found that he had died in April while waiting for the final factual record. That's the story of what's happening at the CEC right now: delays, lack of serious attention to environmental issues, and, unfortunately, a lack of commitment on these very important issues.
Unfortunately, that's not an isolated case. The last four factual records, three of which happened within the last two years, have taken an average of six months to vote for publication. It's supposed to take two.
I have very serious concerns about the CEC, and I think it's very important that the committee take time to understand what's happening in this agreement, the oldest experiment in this environmental and trade arena, before going too far, too fast with other agreements.
Has the CEC been effective in protecting the environment? A review of the CEC's almost 15 years will show an enormous amount of information on the North American environment--and I would be happy to refer committee members to some of the CEC's significant reports--but measured against its potential, my view is that the CEC has fallen far short and that it is primarily the fault of the three governments who oversee it.
There's an inadequate budget, which has held steady at $9 million since 1995; there's been no increase, so it's obviously been a real decrease. There's been a lack of imagination and creativity for an agreement that allows cooperation on an unlimited number of North American environmental issues and at a time when those environmental challenges are increasing. There is nothing in the agreement or in the program at the CEC paying attention to North America's outsized ecological footprint. The most innovative aspects of the CEC, as I explained in my article that was made available to the committee, have been minimized or reduced to dead letters.
There have been some positive developments in the CEC. The CEC has helped Mexico eliminate the use of DDT on an accelerated basis, and it has produced a lot of interesting reports, which again I could refer you to. But there have also been problem spots. For example, the CEC did a report showing how trade corridors at the borders cause significant air pollution.
I want to emphasize how I think future side agreements could be improved. First of all, reaching out to the public and stakeholders and giving everybody room at the table is key. This is what was different about the NAFTA package, and this is what I'm afraid has been moved away from in recent free trade agreements involving the United States and Canada. The CEC has had limited success, even with its ambitious program.
The Joint Public Advisory Committee, which was created as a main body of the agreement, has not succeeded in reaching a significant portion of the North American public. The countries have done everything they can think of to weaken the public's citizen submission process. If the Proulx agreement is the model, which I assume it is, the weak commitment that the parties should not weaken environmental laws or enforcement to attract economic benefits of trade is a disappointment. There are no mechanisms in the environmental cooperation agreement for the Proulx agreement for an effective engagement of civil society.
Let's go back to my example of Mr. Lara García. At least at the CEC he could file a complaint and get an objective independent review. Under the Proulx agreement, he can only submit a question to a bureaucrat.
My recommendations for future trade agreements are as follows. They should set up independent commissions or mechanisms that can provide honest, objective information on the trade and environment link; we need honest brokers of information, not more political spin that is only focused on promoting trade. We need programs to monitor and address environmental impacts of trade, which need adequate funding and follow-through. A much stronger effort needs to be made to bring in the provinces, since they have shared jurisdiction on environmental matters and are primarily responsible for much of the resource development that is involved in trade. There need to be much more meaningful mechanisms to engage civil society to provide meaningful forums for discussion, debate, and involvement.
Finally, I urge you to make a more serious study of the NAFTA experience and open up the debate on what is working in the NAFTA experience and what needs improvement, both on environment and on labour.
Thank you.
