Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is Garry Neil. I am the executive director of the Council of Canadians, Canada's largest social justice organization with roughly 75,000 supporters from coast to coast to coast. Since 1985 the Council of Canadians has brought Canadians together to act for social, economic, and environmental justice here in Canada and around the world.
The council supports more balanced global trade, freer movement of people, and more robust exchanges between world cultures. But we reject the trade and investment agreements that have been negotiated by Canada, both bilaterally and multilaterally, because they create arbitrary limits on government policies designed to create jobs, protect public health, lower greenhouse gas emissions, or otherwise protect the environment.
It's pretty hard to support these agreements when we see Ontario's Green Energy Act under threat from the WTO and when we've seen Canada pay out millions of dollars to corporations under the investor-state dispute settlement provisions of investment treaties arising from challenges to legitimate Canadian public policy decisions.
We would note that just last month the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported that Canada has attracted the sixth-largest number of such cases of investor-state dispute settlement. UNCTAD also pointed out that governments are now wary of regulating in certain fields out of fear of lawsuits. The UNCTAD report states that “...the [investor-state dispute-settlement] regime reaches far beyond its original intention.” And UNCTAD urges “policy makers around the globe...to bring the system back to its original role of promoting good governance and fostering the rule of law.”
Free trade agreements and the WTO have been enormously successful at removing public policy barriers to corporate profits. They have been less successful at distributing wealth equitably, integrating poorer countries into the global economy, improving labour standards, or encouraging truly sustainable development.
In the free trade era, economic inequality has grown in Canada. Average real incomes, after inflation, have been stagnant. And we continue to shed high-wage and innovative manufacturing jobs in favour of resource extraction and export. Canada's balance of trade has worsened with four of the five countries with which we have fully implemented free trade agreements—Mexico, Chile, Israel, and Costa Rica. Our balance of trade with the fifth, the United States, has improved only because we are racing to the bottom with them, and they are winning at the moment. Their balance of trade has been steadily declining for a long time.
Let me turn now to the specifics of the Canada-Jordan free trade agreement.
First, with respect to the agreement on environmental protection, the council supports the position put forward by the Canadian Environmental Law Association that the GATT exception for measures necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health should be amended to expand the scope to include measures relating to environmental or health objectives. There are a whole range of public policies that have an important impact on environmental or health objectives even if they are primarily addressing other issues. These should be covered by the exception.
Thus, with respect to the Canada-Jordan environmental side agreement, we believe it should not be limited only to those laws the primary purpose of which is environmental protection, but should include other laws that also relate in part to environmental protection. We also think the exclusion from that side agreement of laws relating to public health and worker health and safety is not reasonable.
On the Canada-Jordan Agreement on Labour Cooperation, I won't make many comments here, since we have Mr. Rowlinson with us. With respect to the Agreement on Labour Cooperation, we share the concerns expressed to you by a number of other witnesses. In particular, we note that Jeff Vogt, legal adviser to the Department of Human and Trade Union Rights at the International Trade Union Confederation recently made the case to the committee that Jordan is not in compliance with the requirements of article 1 of the agreement, given its ongoing violations of core ILO conventions.
We would like to see a human rights impact assessment of this agreement. We urge you to recommend that a human rights impact assessment be undertaken before the FTA is approved and on an annual basis when it is in force. One of the conditions this committee set on the passage of the free trade agreement with Colombia was the inclusion of a mandatory annual human rights impact assessment of economic impacts of the agreement. We suggest that you go one step further: we recommend that one be undertaken before the FTA is implemented.
While Jordan seems to be in transition from a monarchy to a democracy, there are serious human rights concerns. According to the Freedom in the World 2011 report, Jordan had a “not free” status. Concerns include: the limitations on the ability of citizens to change the government; inequality of women and minorities; limitations on free speech and free media; restricted labour rights; and cases of arbitrary detention, torture, and loss of life. The assessment should cover labour conditions and workers' rights as well, of course.
Over the past year, under a UN Human Rights Council mandate, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has developed a set of guiding principles on human rights impact assessments of trade and investment agreements. The purpose of preparing such a document prior to signing free trade or investment deals is to ensure that they are not inconsistent with a country's pre-existing treaty obligations, including those to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights.
For example, the UN report says that certain human rights may preclude a country adopting certain measures, including lowering tariffs or strengthening intellectual property rights in a way that deprives people of their rights. Also, countries should not be blocked from controlling private actors “as a result of an excessively high level of protection of foreign investors established on their territory or because of a broad understanding of the prohibition of imposing performance requirements on such investors”.
Of particular concern with respect to Jordan, of course, would be the recently implemented human right to clean water and sanitation. Jordan is one of the 10 most water-scarce countries in the world. It is dependent on the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers for its surface water, and most of these are taken by Israel and Syria. Jordan's groundwater resources are being over-exploited. What the FTA and FIPA will do is essentially lock in existing corporate expectations, which include water intake for mining and manufacturing.
I want to add a few words about an area that I feel particularly close to, which is culture. For close to 30 years, before I became the council's executive director, I worked as a cultural policy consultant, and I've written and spoken internationally about culture and trade issues. I want to use this opportunity to make a few comments about the cultural exception, which of course I am pleased to see in the Canada-Jordan agreement.
Unfortunately, we continue to use the definition of cultural industries as it was understood in the late 1980s, when we concluded the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement and for the first time included the cultural exception. But as these agreements have evolved, the definition needs both to be updated—to include, for example, new media and video games—and to be expanded, to include visual arts, performing arts, and crafts.
I note that the expansion language in fact is contained in Canada's free trade agreement with Colombia, and it was introduced at the insistence of Colombia. Frankly, they're correct. It needs to be in these agreements.
It is also appropriate to adopt language for culture in the FTAs that is similar to article 1-5 of the Canada-Jordan free trade agreement, which covers the relationship of the free trade agreement to the multilateral environmental agreements. In case of inconsistencies between the FTA and the MEA, the obligations under the environmental agreement prevail. Bilateral and multilateral free trade and investment agreements should now begin to provide that obligations that parties may have to each other under multilateral cultural agreements should similarly prevail over those in the free trade and investment treaties.
Just as a brief conclusion, as I think my position is pretty clear, with all that said, Mr. Chairman, we really do not believe that it is good public policy for the government to be pursuing trade and investment agreements that are economically basically meaningless with volatile and undemocratic nations like Honduras, Colombia, and Jordan.