Good morning. My name is Gil McGowan. I am president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, which is Alberta's largest worker organization.
I don't have to tell you this committee has been getting an earful from Canadians. You have been hearing about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership will affect important Canadian industries. You have been hearing about health care and prescription drugs, about intellectual property and environmental protection, and about procurement policies and investor-state provisions. We at the AFL share many of these concerns, but I am not actually going to talk about those concerns today.
Instead, I am going to spend my time discussing an issue that most people are not talking about, but should be. Specifically, I want to talk about how the labour mobility provisions laid out in chapter 12 of the TPP are going to distort the Canadian labour market and seriously undermine the interests of Canadian workers.
Like other Canadians, we at the AFL got our first look at the full text of the TPP in the fall. One of the first things that caught our attention was the section of the agreement pertaining to temporary foreign workers. The way we read it, at the time, the agreement seemed to give sweeping new powers to employers, powers that would allow them to dramatically expand the use of TFWs to displace Canadian workers and suppress wages.
We almost couldn't believe what we were reading, so we reached out to a prominent Canadian labour and trade law firm to ask for their expert analysis. I am tabling that legal opinion for the committee today. I have given copies to your assistants. According to the team of trade and labour specialists at Goldblatt Partners, chapter 12 is even worse than we had feared. Based on their analysis, the effect of the TPP's labour mobility [Technical difficulty—Editor].