Thank you.
That's going to be a tough act to follow, Meghan.
I'm Tom Green, an ecological economist, and I'm probably the first ecological economist that you've had here today or maybe during all if your hearings. I was doing a radio interview recently and the interviewer had a problem putting those two words together. That's precisely the problem. Most economists are trained without any understanding of the environmental sciences or the feedbacks between the economy and the environment and how a degraded environment eventually affects our economic prospects and human well-being.
I also feel a lot of pressure, since I'm one of a couple of individuals selected not because I represent someone, but just because I wanted to come and speak to you as an individual.
I also have a Ph.D. in ecological economics, so maybe I'm not just an ordinary middle-class Canadian. I'm associate faculty at Royal Roads University. I also prepared a written submission but didn't have time to get it to you to have it translated. You'll get that eventually.
Ecological economics arose out of a collaboration between economists and ecologists in response to the growing ecological crisis of the sixties and seventies and realizing that these two disciplines needed to speak to each other much more effectively. Our theoretical framework offers a broadened lens for looking at things such as trade policies that are usually omitted from conventional economic analysis. The problem as I see it now is that basically it's like having an accountant who just loves adding up all the asset side of things but is not so interested in looking at liabilities, and that's not going to be very useful for you in deciding whether you want to invest in a company or give them a bank loan or whatever.
Most analysis done of these trade agreements has paid too little attention to the environmental externalities of trade, such as trade's impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, and the extraction of resources. I was really impressed with Brenda Sayers' comments about all these companies talking about how this trade agreement will affect them but forgetting that it involves the lands, the indigenous lands, where these resources are being extracted, often without prior and informed consent.
We broaden the lens, and I think that's why I wanted to be here today to speak to you. We also tend to emphasize that just because GDP increases, it does not mean that human well-being is increasing. In fact, the reality is that since about the mid-seventies in rich countries in the world, GDP has been going up and human well-being has been flatlined. I think that's partly because we have the problem that most of the wealth is accruing to the one per cent, and also because we've seen the general implementation of a very neo-liberal approach to the economy, where the powers of corporations are ever stronger, and the ability of nations to regulate as they need to in order to secure human well-being, and to create resilience for communities and so on, is given ever less room.
Even when one looks at this agreement from the conventional economic lens, it's not that good. I think Krugman is right in pointing out that “the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest”. It's overstated, and the downsides are often forgotten. We already have a world with a lot of free trade because we've had so many regional free trade agreements, and we've had the GATT round and all those kinds of things.
Tufts University did an estimate and said that Canada would lose 58,000 jobs between now and 2025, but for me, as an ecological economist, that's not the key concern. The key concern is that at this moment in history we are facing a critical climate crisis. This trade agreement should be drafted in a way that ensures we can take the measures necessary to deal with that, to reflect the Paris commitment, and to reflect this current government's ambitions regarding that.
Instead, the investor-state dispute settlement provisions that my colleagues have referred to reduce the leeway to do that. On the environment, the chapter 20 wording is completely unenforceable and not meaningful.