Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, this amendment would remove from the Canada-Korea trade agreement all of the provisions respecting the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.
We could probably spend quite a long time debating the pros and cons of investor state, which I don't propose to do here today.
What I will do is summarize a couple of concerns. Investor-state provisions, in effect, allow investors to take disputes over the agreement not to the domestic courts of either jurisdiction, particularly the jurisdiction in which it is alleged that there is a violation of the agreement, but rather to an international tribunal that is outside the domestic sovereign court systems of the parties to the agreement.
It is my understanding that this originated in chapter 11 of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and then NAFTA. One of the reasons for that was because at that time Mexico, one of the parties, was not considered to have a judiciary that was considered to be robust enough. Their commitment to the rule of law was not such that the parties would have confidence that they could get a fair adjudication of their claims in Mexico.
What's happened, in my view, is that investor-state provisions have made their way into all trade agreements, even when the signatories to the agreement have mature judiciaries, established rules of law, fair court systems with attributes like security of tenure for the adjudicators, and solid appeal systems, and where the people of the country can be quite satisfied that litigants appearing before the court get a fair hearing. I think that's the case in both Canada and Korea.
So the case to be made for the investor-state provisions is not present in this case, particularly when the risk of the investor-state provisions is that we are subjecting Canada to potentially massive liabilities by investors to be heard before foreign tribunals that we are not confident have security of tenure; for which we're not confident that there is an effective appeal mechanism; and where judgments could be made against the Government of Canada, subjecting taxpayers' dollars to liability when those claims, we think, should be more properly adjudicated in the Canadian courts or the Korean courts.
I would urge my colleagues to support this amendment and remove the ISDS provision from this agreement.