Perfect.
After a long debate during the negotiations of the free trade agreement between Canada and Colombia, in particular with a great number of questions asked about human rights violations and provisions dealing with trade union human rights violations and murder attempts as well against trade unionists, we think that what is happening in our country is an elimination of the trade union movement.
When the free trade agreement entered into effect between the two countries it was on August 15, and that free trade agreement represented for Colombia the first free trade agreement with what is called a developed nation. It was an attempt to agree to come to a final agreement aimed at moving forward in labour rights and in environmental rights, with some principles to ensure the protection of workers' rights, with the obligation to ensure protection of the environment.
The commitment was achieved through the negotiation of parallel agreements that established a number of obligations, and some mechanisms as well for cooperation. The purpose was to help strengthen institutions and programs in the relevant areas, namely labour and environment.
With regard to protecting trade unionists, labour, and environmental rights, there was the decision made to have an annual report to assess the human rights impacts of the fulfilment of the free trade agreement. The report that was presented by the Canadian government recently was very superficial, and there was no report presented by the Colombian government.
Furthermore, the Colombian government has not yet had any type of consultation with the communities and population groups that have been affected by the agreement. There has been no public announcement of the government's intention to establish any kind of policy with regard to the implementation of the free trade agreement in Colombia. So the idea of protecting rights in side agreements was progress and was an indication of intent and commitment, but it has not been fulfilled. There now needs to be a clearing up of the ethical problems surrounding the negotiations.
There has been a group of social organizations, union leaders, women, ethnic groups, and NGOs from Colombia and Canada who decided to begin a political and technical initiative to build a strategy that would make it possible to monitor and assess the impact of the free trade agreement on human rights in general. The purpose is to establish a baseline that can give an idea of what the current state of rights in communities is, and then be able to measure the human rights impact.
It is too early to make final conclusions about the impact of the agreement's implementation on human rights, but we do know what has happened since the agreement went into force. That is what we are doing to create the baseline so that we can have a reading of the major changes that have taken place in the sectors where Canadian investment is most present. From that baseline, then, we would establish a strategy for future monitoring, and we believe that monitoring should take place on an annual basis.
In the report we obtained an idea of the trade relationship between Canada and Colombia, with an emphasis on the presence of Canadian companies in the country. We focused on the main social, labour, and environmental impacts that have occurred due to the presence of certain Canadian companies in Colombia.
In the study we took into account two specific cases. The first case was linked to the presence of the Pacific Rubiales Energy oil company in Puerto Gaitan. The study addressed the violation of labour rights in recent years. Almost 10,000 people have been affected. The second case studied was the case linked to Gran Colombia Gold. That company wanted to have open-pit mining in Marmato, in the Caldas region. That would have meant displacing the town to another area.
In the executive summary you have in front of you, you will find some statistics that deal with the trade flows between Canada and Colombia. Some of these statistics will give you an idea of how much trade is taking place. A number of Canadian multinational companies are on Colombian ground, and there has been an exponential increase in the number of those companies over the last ten years. That presence has been concentrated in mining and natural resource extraction, mostly in coal, oil, and gold. The companies become established in the country by creating branches that undertake exploration and mining activities for all types of resources.
Canadian investment in telecommunications, oil, energy and gas, and transportation has increased steadily since 1994. In particular, in recent years new companies have begun to invest in mining, paper, shoes, educational software, and construction, among other things.
In addition to that trade presence, which began through foreign direct investment and the establishment of subsidiaries of major multinational companies in the country, Canada has played a significant role when it comes to defining legislative frameworks with regard to preparing the ground to welcome Canadian companies to Colombia.
CIDA is the main Canadian cooperation agency for Latin America. It has had a role with regard to, in particular, the reform of the country's mining code. In 2006 CIDA was involved in a code to liberalize Colombian gold mines. The purpose or the intent was to provide greater access for foreign mining companies. Before that, claiming to protect jobs and the environment, CIDA and the CERI decided to plan, starting in 1997, a project in which almost $11 million were invested to support the freeing up of mining and to create a legislative framework that could be used so that multinational companies could have easier access to mines in Colombia.
In the executive summary that you have in front of you, you will find some of the major findings of the study that was carried out in Puerto Gaitan and in Marmato, in those two municipalities. I won't go through those findings, as they are in the report, and I do not have much time.
I will finish my short presentation by talking a bit about the future. Less than a year after the free trade agreement between Canada and Colombia went into effect, the impact on human rights, labour rights, and environmental rights must be considered in a way that recognizes the technical conditions that exist to be able to measure the impact and also the political will of the official parties involved to conduct rigorous monitoring of the effects in both countries of the free trade agreement.
Given these considerations, it is important to point out that the official parties to the agreement, with regard to Colombia in particular, should not be responsible for establishing a monitoring system that measures the actual impact of the free trade agreement on human rights.
There is no public information available. The communities that are most affected have not had any role, and they have been shunted to the side.