Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity.
Gerry Barr, president and CEO of CCIC, sends his regrets. We were given barely 24 hours' notice, making it impossible, unfortunately, for him to change his schedule or agenda.
I think it's important to flag at the outset that there is tremendous interest on the part of many civil society and human rights organizations to appear to discuss Bill C-2 and to propose amendments, which we have yet to see on paper. Most are still awaiting news of possible hearings.
The process to inform people with such short notice does present great problems. I think we need to be fair so that groups can see that there is in fact an openness to participation and debate, as has been promised in the House.
CCIC believes very strongly in the potential for trade to lift people out of poverty, if it brings benefits to vulnerable populations and allows states that are willing to promote development outcomes and protect the environment. But trade can also lead to dislocation of marginal groups, and it can lead to heightened exploitation or violence. There are no automatic relationships. The details of the agreement matter, and the local context matters.
As you know, there has been a lot of public controversy about this agreement because of the human rights crisis in Colombia. In our view, a country with such deep levels of violence does provide special obligations of due diligence for Canada as it seeks to promote increased trade and investment.
I want to speak to three areas today. I want to provide a reminder of some of the key human rights concerns. I want to highlight from an analysis of the actual text of the agreement, which is now out and which CCIC commissioned with legal experts. This is not the theory of trade, but an analysis of the actual trade deal on the table. And I thirdly want to speak to the issue of a human rights impact assessment, which is such an important area.
I am going to spend a little less time on the human rights concerns, because I think Yessika has just given a very moving and important overview.
There is a lot of different conflicting information out there on the human rights situation. In the end, I think members of Parliament have to decide which sources of information you are going to listen to.
We focus ourselves on independent and highly respected human rights organizations and on those working with the most marginalized in Colombia. From these sources, the picture is pretty clear. There are improvements in the area of kidnappings, and there's an increased feeling of personal security in major urban centres in Colombia. But there are continued and unacceptably high levels of violence and violations, importantly violence in which the Colombian state is deeply implicated. Yessika has spoken very well on the issue of paramilitary violence.
I think it's important to flag. We have noticed a lot of discussion in the House and in the media about violence in Colombia just being about the drug economy and among drug lords. What is not being underscored enough--and this is why I think you need to hear from Colombian human rights activists--is how the government of Colombia itself is deeply linked to that violence, and it's not in a minor way.
Yessika has just highlighted the frightful revelations of the last year in which the president's intelligence unit, the DAS, is now clearly exposed as having masterminded massive illegal surveillance, which included Supreme Court magistrates and human rights organizations. The illegally obtained information was used to provide hit lists to the paramilitary to attack trade unionists, human rights defenders, who were attacked, murdered, and whose children were threatened. The direct linkage between the role that the state was playing to develop information to give to paramilitary, who in turn attacked civil society organizations in Colombia, provides an important reminder of the nature of the violence. It is not just fights among drug lords.
I think it is also important to underscore that the rise of paramilitary activity has coincided with significant increases in the rates of internal displacement. Since 1985, it is estimated that there are now 4.9 million people displaced in Colombia, second only to Sudan.
Why is that issue important for the trade agreement? It is key because violence and displacement are directly linked to the struggle for control over land, both for narco-trafficking and for the development of natural resources, including minerals, oil, and gas. Canadian companies are heavily involved in these sectors. There is a direct and reasonable concern about the likelihood of even unknowing Canadian corporate complicity in the occupation of land that was obtained through violence.
I want to quote from the UN special rapporteur for internally displaced peoples, who noted that there is a widespread perception among displaced people in Colombia that “while displacement may originally have been caused by armed conflict, the taking over of their lands by large corporations is at least a side effect, if not part of a policy of forced displacement”.
So I think we have a lot of reasons to be concerned about the linkages between violence and the state, between violence and displacement over land and resources, and then the question of who is going to access those lands and resources for profit, which is the direct question of commercial relationships for Canada.
Let me talk about the trade deal on the table now. In response to some of these concerns, the Canada-Colombia trade deal has been described and explained to Canadians as a different kind of trade deal, as a deal that has top-notch safeguards and that addresses human rights. So that is why we waited for the release of the text and we undertook collaboratively with legal experts the job of examining the text.
What happens when you layer this particular trade deal onto the context of violence? It is not to say that the trade deal causes all the problems, which existed before the trade deal even arrived. The question is what is the likely impact of the trade deal in this context?
In our view, from looking at the agreement as negotiated, the deal turns out to be actually a fairly typical and aggressive market access agreement. The safeguards in the side agreements are quite ineffective.
Let me go over a couple of examples. On the substantive trade measures, there's a very important investment chapter, which provides Canadian investors in mining, oil, and gas with unprecedented new powers of enforcement in the Colombian context. These kinds of protections didn't exist in the bilateral relationship between Canada and Colombia before: new powers of enforcement to secure access to resources that would discourage contestation of their projects despite the highly contested nature of land in Colombia.
In our view, the arrival of those new powers of enforcement can act, and would act, as an anti-democratic force in Colombia inasmuch as they it provide a disincentive to strengthen human rights laws--for example, if the Colombian government wanted to introduce regulations to deal with the illegal seizure of lands once investors were already on.
Professor Penelope Simons from the University of Ottawa, whom I really encourage you to bring as an expert on commerce and investment, has underscored that the text also has no obligations on corporations to screen their security forces, conduct human rights training, or disclose any payments to the host-state government or to guerrilla forces.
There are no provisions currently existing in Canada, as this committee recommended in 2008, requiring the home state--that would be Canada--to create a right of action or to ensure access to our courts for victims of human rights violations that were committed by our corporate nationals. So the investment treaty focuses on investor protections and provides heavy threats of enforcement to secure their operations and no corresponding binding responsibilities and no recourse for victims who feel aggrieved by corporate actions in Colombia.
We talked briefly about the agriculture market access session. Again, the CCIC brief, which is in front of you--I'm happy to take more questions on that later--shows that a very aggressive market liberalization of Colombian agricultural sectors would accelerate displacement in vulnerable communities. We looked specifically at the areas of grains, wheat in particular, and pork, because a lot of studies have been done on the impact of the U.S. deal in these areas, and our products trade very competitively with the U.S. in those areas.
Based on Colombian analysis, the Canadian FTA would likely have a very negative impact on production and jobs in Colombia, undermining, for example, the livelihoods of about 12,000 local wheat farmers and possibly eliminating up to 39,000 jobs in the informal pork sector. The deal, interestingly, virtually eliminates the Colombian government's access to safeguard measures to protect farmers' livelihoods and incomes. In our analysis there is no evidence of a human rights friendly or developmentally friendly agreement here.
The side accords have been widely touted, but are they effective? Again, I would encourage you to call Steven Shrybman, a well-known environmental lawyer who has done the legal analysis of this. In a word, the environmental side deal you have before you in the Colombian agreement doesn't even match NAFTA standards. It may provide a legal disincentive to raise environmental standards. The labour side accord offers no independent means of enforcement for labour unions who are raising complaints.
The whole mechanism of the labour side accord, which has been pitched as a safeguard for violation, relies exclusively on the goodwill of the governments, the two parties with the least incentive to air dirty laundry, to enforce the accord.
Even if either of the governments decides to enforce and to send a complaint up to an arbitration panel, at best it can provide fines, which in fact would be resources to be fed back into programs likely run by the Colombian government. Unions in Canada and Colombia have denounced this kind of side accord as a response to the context in Colombia. In other places or other countries there may be a less severe labour scenario and the opportunity to propose papers and have a government hear your complaints may be an issue, but in Colombia this kind of side accord, which provides no independent recourse for unionists, is not seen as a safeguard.
Let me come to the last area, because it is really important. That is the question of a human rights impact assessment. The initial scoping study that we did of the agreement has led to a very strong demand from civil society, which has been taken up by Parliament, for an independent human rights impact assessment to check the validity of the safeguards and to check the nature of the provisions in the agreement before proceeding with implementation.
It's really important for Canada to do this due diligence. Other countries, such as the U.S., Belgium, and Norway, are approaching their trade deals with Colombia slowly and looking much more in depth at human rights issues. I noticed Mike Michaud, a Democrat in the U.S. Congress, just sent a letter about his concerns about the Canadian deal.
With the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement and with recent initiatives, human rights impact assessments have really moved into the mainstream of the debate on trade, and this is a really positive thing. The challenge now is to do the process credibly. What is a credible human rights impact assessment? Civil society has spoken to the need, at a minimum, for an independent assessment to be undertaken on the deal, and for the results of the assessment to be addressed before implementation. This was also the demand of this committee in 2008.
We actually await more details and a copy of the proposal as presented by the Liberal Party. We've seen the transcript in Hansard that has been accepted by the government. That's all we have to date.
I want to offer some initial comments on that. We would be interested to understand if that is an amendment that is proposed to be added to the agreement itself, to Bill C-2. How would that work legally?
As it currently stands, although the idea of the human rights impact assessment is so dear and important, the current proposal lacks credibility. There are three key issues that I would like us to discuss.
The assessment has to be prior. A human rights approach demands that we seek to avoid measures that can lead to human rights violations before they happen. It's true that it's more challenging than an assessment after the fact, but there are a lot of precedents. Think of environmental impact assessments. Think of the European Union's commitment to sustainable impact assessments. These are all done as prior impact assessments, and it's what speaks to the need and importance for Canada of avoiding violations, not documenting them after they've happened. A prior assessment is the first key thing.
Second, the assessment has to be independent. It must be at arm's length from those making decisions on the trade agreement. It has to be undertaken by a team with human rights and trade expertise and employ a human rights methodology that is transparent, consultative, and participatory.
Again, this is not a weird, outrageous claim. Look at the European Union; for its social impact assessment, it commissions independent teams that report back to an oversight body. Their model may not necessarily be ideal, but the important principle is respected. It's not acceptable for government officials who are committed to the trade deal that they have negotiated to assess the impacts. This is doubly true in Colombia, where government has shown a marked aversion to those who report on human rights issues and has attacked them.
The third issue is that the assessment has to be oriented to results and action. It needs to have precise and directed conclusions and recommendations for actions. There has to be a commitment in the amendment that actions and recommendations would be acted upon, rather than a commitment to table a report that would just be read and put on the shelf.
Speaking to the important principle, in our view the current proposal is too unwieldy. It actually claims to address the entire trade deal and claims it will document all impacts. It's not practical. We think it would be more realistic to identify specific aspects and provisions that Canada is concerned about, look at the impacts of those specific measures, make recommendations on them, and then commit to taking action on those recommendations. It has to be done empirically; it can't be done by sitting at a desk and assuming what the impacts are.
To sum up, we need a commitment in principle to act on the human rights impacts recommendations. We need results and action, we need the assessment to be prior, and we need the assessment to be done independently, and those are three key issues that we don't see right now.
I'd urge you to invite legal expert Dr. James Harrison of the U.K. to appear before you as a witness. He set out a series of important benchmarks to assess human rights impact assessments.
I think with the discussion of assessment, we have an opportunity to—
