International Trade Committee on Nov. 25th, 2013

[Joyce Carter]

I'll start and then I think Nancy will add specifically as it relates to the Halifax Logistics Park.

Generally, when you look at all of our members, when you look at the port, the airport, CN and the various members of the Halifax Gateway Council, our infrastructure today is of a way that we do have access capacity. You would have noticed in my remarks that in the beginning stages, at least, through the development of the $115 billion in projects and as well through the early stages of CETA, the infrastructure is fairly well aligned across the board.

There are pockets through the infrastructure where the alignment doesn't necessarily exist. One that's been identified clearly is the Halifax Logistics Park. Nancy can speak more directly to that.

[Nancy Phillips]

The Halifax Logistics Park would be an area that could benefit from further review for infrastructure funding. Right now in phase one of the Halifax Logistics Park we only have 48 acres of land left. In order to access the remaining acreage that exists in phase two, roadway infrastructure needs to take place to bring that to the market. From a gateway community perspective that would be our number one priority.

Port, airport and rail all have great infrastructure, and the existing capacity, as Joyce said, is not fully maxed out today. In order to begin to increase the usage and the capacity, the Halifax Logistics Park is a value-add to help bring that cargo on stream.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

We'll move to Mr. O'Toole. The floor is yours for seven minutes.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to echo Mr. Davies' comments. I thank all of you for taking the time to appear. I think we all agree that it's important for members of Parliament to get outside of Ottawa and hear from folks in important centres across Canada, such as Halifax. I love being in Halifax at any time, so it's great to be here.

I have a few questions for both groups appearing. I'll start with the folks from the Gateway Council.

I'd echo the chair's comments and I look forward to seeing the map once translated, because in Ottawa we know about a lot of the great opportunities happening in Atlantic Canada. Our government is supporting all of them, from shipbuilding through to the lower Churchill, but I've never heard it expressed as $115 billion in megaprojects.

I'm wondering whether some of the council's marketing efforts around securing Halifax's role as central to all of those megaprojects could dovetail into also selling Halifax in Europe. Has there been consideration of connecting your work with the megaprojects to a burgeoning opportunity in Europe?

[Joyce Carter]

There has. I mentioned in my remarks the recent trip that the Gateway Council members conducted in Europe. We had this trip in planning stages for a while. In fact, we took a similar road show to Mississauga a few months prior to the announcement of CETA.

As we were planning our trip to Europe and looking into those markets, mostly we worked very closely with the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, who developed the report on the $115 billion in ongoing economic projects. It's a very nicely packaged, detailed report, which we're happy to submit as well. The map came from it.

As we were developing that to take it into Europe—visiting Europe is obviously very different from visiting Mississauga to talk about your projects and your gateway—we were becoming aware that CETA might be announced at roughly the same time. The timing couldn't have been more perfect for us. In fact, we were there on November 3 or 4, within a week of the announcement in Brussels. We changed our plans, not the cities we were visiting, but the marketing behind them slightly, to the extent that we could, and the presentations we did in those cities.

The importance of linking those two together for the rest of our trip became very obvious to us in the first presentation in the first city on Monday morning, in Brussels, to the point that as we went through the program we adjusted it accordingly. All of them are very closely linked.

As the audiences in the various countries in Europe learned more about the megaprojects, to my surprise they also learned a fair amount about CETA. It was big news and a big story here. I personally was very surprised at how little was known in those markets about this agreement, so we took the opportunity, to the extent we could and to the extent we had been involved and using the information we had, to speak about them and link them together.

Certainly we are planning to go back, and soon, and we're planning to go back often over the next two years, because of the tremendous interest in hearing about both and in linking those two together.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you.

Certainly within our caucus and our government—I'll have been an MP for a year as of tomorrow, actually—there has been talk about the gateway. In the last year our government, along with the province, supported cold storage capability, which I think will be spectacular for the seafood industry in particular, which has great wins with CETA.

You mentioned briefly in your remarks a marketing fund that you think might be one way you can help sell the gateway and Halifax's role in growing European trade. Certainly we want to try to help not only industry sectors but also regional partners to benefit from CETA. Would you mind going into what you foresee that as being and what you would recommend to us?

[Joyce Carter]

The Halifax Gateway Council is a not-for-profit organization funded by our members. To the extent that we do projects that can be funded by any of the three levels of government, we obviously are able to do that, but for the most part our work is funded by our members, because they see the commercial value in so doing.

As we were putting together our plans to go to Europe, it just happened to be how it worked out. I talk about going often and repeating what we've said, but It became obvious to us as we were in Europe that we needed to have more of a government presence with us to talk about the benefits of CETA and about the details that we don't yet have. I realize that those will come out over the years.

Because in private companies the dollars are always being assessed, it would be very helpful to have cost-sharing. It doesn't have to be 100% dollars, but even 75% dollars would help, in a fund that we could access through the Halifax Gateway Council and put together to take those companies with us to Europe with some cost-sharing in that regard, particularly as we're talking about the benefits of CETA.

It is really early stages, but when we came back, this was one of the first things we took away, without even realizing that you folks were going to be here this week looking for input. It was one of the early things we took away to look at where we might be able to up our game. To up our game takes some time and some money.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

I have one quick question.

How am I for time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

You have 30 seconds.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Okay. I'll thank you for that answer.

I have one quick question—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

You can split your time, because we don't have any Liberals here today. We'll move to Mr. Cannan next, so go ahead.

[James Hutt]

I would say, given the concerns and given the fact that the federal government has already stated that there will be upward pressure on drug costs, it is apparent that drug costs will rise for Canadians. Even when there is provincial compensation, it doesn't really pan out across the board for taxpayers who pay out of pocket or pay from private drug plans.

When it comes to data protection, what this does is it locks this into place, so we can't reduce that period in the future. It doesn't really allow us to increase the drugs that Canadians need and the ways they can get them.

If we look more broadly, we've been talking about pharmacare for the last 40 years. There are numerous arguments for the idea that we should be including drugs in universal public health care, but essentially, it would save us more than $1.5 billion per year.

Locking us in takes us further away from anything like that. Given the fact that when Canadians can't meet the drug costs and don't get drugs, they get sicker and cost the health care system more, it doesn't make sense for us to go further away from that. If we did try to move towards something like pharmacare in the future, we would face backlash with respect to the economic trade agreement and from European investors looking at a loss of market share.

Does that fully answer your question?

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

In part it does. Certainly you're mixing a treaty agreement with—there is nothing in the agreement that would take away any provincial right to set up a provincial pharmacare system. There is nothing in the agreement to preclude that.

Your point that there could be higher costs over time is a valid one, which the federal government has addressed through its willingness to provide compensation to the provinces, who are the payers.

I also think that some of the broader assessments of the rise in pharma costs haven't taken into consideration the provincial governments' cooperation and collaboration in recent years on buying in bulk. We haven't even seen the savings from the bulk purchasing, yet the modelling for costs are going from the old model before the provinces start saving money. My personal opinion is that the work the provinces have been doing will actually help mitigate some of the rises, but that's more of a statement than a question.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

I thought of that.

Mr. Cannan, you have two and a half minutes.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Two and a half minutes. Thank you for sharing my time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Your seven minutes are gone, and I added his. Go ahead. It's okay, you'll get another shot at it.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, ladies and gents, for inviting us. It's good to see Mr. Chisholm, a member from the Nova Scotia area here who used to be on the committee, so we welcome him back to our hearings.

I appreciate the time as well as the fact that you're volunteering specifically for the Halifax Gateway Council. I like the idea of one voice. One-stop shopping makes it much more efficient for any businesses that are trying to work their way through regulatory challenges with all levels of government, and we're making sure that we can help to streamline those opportunities and move your businesses forward.

I'd like to know what the response was from your European presentations when you went on your trip to Europe.

[Nancy Phillips]

When we made the presentations on the $115 billion in megaprojects combined with CETA, we found the response overwhelming, actually. At the end of every presentation we needed to move on to the next city and we could barely shut the event down. People stayed long after the event was over to ask a lot of questions, to ask for follow-up information, to ask for contacts, and to ask when we were coming back with further information.

Because this is an evolving process for us, we know we need to stay on top of the research and to keep providing that information back to them. There was a real hunger once they heard what was going on. They are a community of 500 million in total, thereabouts, and the information just wasn't as well known, but when we put them in a room and presented to them the cold, hard facts on screens, it was a very interesting process for us.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Impressive. That $115 billion is a big number. Obviously this is not just a short project. It's evolution is over many decades. Just like NAFTA, it can evolve over many years. We're looking at opening a market to 500 million people, and the reason we are doing this is—and I appreciate your idea for the marketing as my background is marketing—as my colleague, Mr. O'Toole said, we need to inform Canadians of this opportunity, and it's only as good as businesses taking advantage of this agreement.

I have a few more questions, but my time is up. I'll come around again. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Yes, you'll come around.

Very good, we'll move now to Mr. Masse. The floor is yours for five minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for having taken the time to come here today.

Mr. Hutt, some would argue that intellectual property rights shouldn't be in trade agreements in the first place. What's your opinion on that?

[James Hutt]

That's an awfully broad question.

I would argue that, especially here in CETA, it's particularly dangerous to be increasing intellectual property rights, especially for brand name pharmaceutical companies, when they haven't even met their past commitment to invest in research and development, and when we see that research and development expenditures in Canada have been declining compared to other countries with far less protection for brand name pharmaceutical companies.

To take a broad question and put it a little more simply, I would say that it's very problematic to include it in the CETA and that, in the end, it's not going to benefit Canadians or increase the access to drugs that we'll have.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

On the reason I ask that, I will go now to Ms. Carter and Ms. Phillips. With regard to your members, has there been an evaluation in terms of their drug cost increases that would be incurred under this agreement and the consequences on their workforces and benefit plans?

[Joyce Carter]

No.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Is that something you might consider doing in the future when the technical data is released so they have an idea what their exposure is? In any big deal, you're going to have some stuff you win on and some stuff you have to give up. I think this is one of the ones that we're giving up, and I just need to understand this a little more.