International Trade Committee on April 21st, 2016

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Okay.

Does language requirement present an obstacle?

I'll give you this scenario. It wasn't that long ago that I had someone in my office from the construction trade nationally. He shared with me an example regarding a construction site. There was a gentleman who was working on site, and his comprehension of the English language was definitely not fluent. In that scenario that he presented, it actually created some job site injuries.

[Sudhir Sandhu]

May I give you just a quick, personal example? I worked in Alberta for three years with a municipality and had an instance where a contractor and a couple of workers complained about the fact that Mexican workers were not as committed to safety. We had a very detailed conversation about what was happening.

The Canadian standards on safety were so much higher that Mexican workers coming in and receiving the extent of safety equipment and apparatus that they were given probably had a perception that they were already much safer, not recognizing that the Canadian safety standards are that much higher.

Language absolutely comes into play. Literacy in English as a second language or French, in that environment, has a direct bearing on safety outcomes. If you cannot read it, if you cannot understand it, you cannot comply with safety requirements. It's that simple.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Mr. Reimer, you—

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

You only have half a minute left.

[Karen Ludwig, Liberal, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Mine's fast. Your answer's going to be faster.

Mr. Reimer, you mentioned the situations of flooding here in Manitoba and the risks that presents. How might that affect your capacity to expand, looking at the increased need and demand for beef in the TPP member countries?

[Heinz Reimer]

Over the last number of years, especially in 2014 and 2011, we had a great amount of flooding in the interlake area and that definitely pushed back.... A lot of those cattle had to be either moved out or in a lot of cases a lot of producers sold those animals. The flooding has definitely caused increased difficulty for our producers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir, your time is up.

We're going to move over to the last question for the panel. It is Mr. Van Kesteren for five minutes. Go ahead, sir.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for coming. In the last panel, one of the panellists was concerned about the health and safety. I don't know, Mr. Reimer, or Mr. Dickson, if you can answer this. Could you tell me whether or not in the slaughterhouses there's a relaxation from the CFIA? Do we still meet the same standards, or are we improving on our standards? I wonder if you can just reply.

[Heinz Reimer]

I'll start and I'll let Andrew continue.

As far as I know, there hasn't been any. There are probably more people checking and making sure everything is done properly. We only have one federally inspected plant in Manitoba. I've toured it, and whenever you go there, there is definitely a CFIA presence there.

[Andrew Dickson]

Our conversations with the processors are to the effect that the standards are as high as they ever have been and are increasing.

The way we go about it is another matter, and that's the issue to us. We have to make sure that throughout the whole system—on the farm, in the processing plants, at distribution and retail, and even in the house—we follow safety standards, not just at one place in a plant.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

I would assume that countries such as Japan are very concerned about those types of procedures. Are the Japanese leading, or are they emulating what we're doing in this country?

[Andrew Dickson]

For example, one company here is partly owned by a Japanese trading company. It's one of their 200 projects in the world. They essentially invested in this because the standards are so high, and they market this product as high quality. It meets or exceeds all the Japanese standards.

To be honest with you, our best products go to the Japanese market. I have nothing against the Canadian consumer, but they don't pay as well. We want to increase that business because we make more money doing it.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Then I have a question to both of you.

You both have processing plants and I understand, Mr. Reimer, that in Carman, there's a new processing plant. I wonder if you could address the spin-offs. I asked this question in the last panel as well. When we talk about how the systems works, there are other jobs and there's other job creation. Could you talk about the spin-offs in those communities and maybe how they've affected those communities, either positively or negatively?

[Heinz Reimer]

Yes, definitely. In Carman, as you know, they've just built it and they're just ramping up there. On the number of employees, I'm sorry, but I don't have the exact number of employees they have there.

In terms of the people hauling the animal in and the finished product being hauled out, there's a tremendous amount of job opportunities in the area. Also, for somebody who's finishing cattle and bringing them into that area, it opens up opportunities that way too.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Mr. Dickson.

[Andrew Dickson]

Customers such as the Japanese send regular teams over to Canada to inspect plants and to inspect the whole processing business. They come on farm. They want to see how we raise the pigs and so on. The Chinese are going to be coming later to inspect plants, because we have a ractopamine-free program in place. We have the Americans coming up to inspect our plants because we sell a lot of product to the United States and vice versa.

There's more and more integration of standards amongst all the various trading companies, because no one wants product sitting in a container at a dock and losing value. We're trying to make sure that problems are solved at the plant or at the farm before they ever arise on the plate, essentially, of the consumer at the end.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

I know in my neck of the woods, the smaller abattoirs are really having a difficult time.

How is that working here in Manitoba? Are the smaller operators able to compete with the larger processing plants?

[Andrew Dickson]

I'm not an expert on this.

The smaller processing plants have to invest significant amounts of money to upgrade to meet the standards we have federally, because there are interprovincial arrangements. If they want to go international, there are certain standards that they have to reach. In some countries, for example, they might have a standard to attain for the United States market, but not for the Japanese market.

Some of the processors are slowly looking at these as opportunities and whether they can sell some product into these markets. It's not easy for them, and they're going to need some help. It can be done. I know one small firm that's upgraded its system so it can sell into the United States market.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you very much.

Your time is up, Mr. Van Kesteren.

That ends this panel. Thank you, witnesses, for coming, and for giving us your briefs and taking our questions. We had a good dialogue on this panel. Thanks very much.

We're going to recess for 20 minutes, and then we'll be back with our last panel for today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Good afternoon, everyone. This is our final panel for the day. It's our final panel for our western trip. Our committee has travelled. We started on Sunday. We did B.C. on Monday, Alberta on Tuesday, Saskatchewan on Wednesday, and here we are in Manitoba today. We've heard from many witnesses, and we had a lot of audience come to many of the sessions also.

This is the study on TPP. It's a big agreement, worth a trillion dollars in world trade. When you look at the context of the 6,000-page TPP agreement, it would affect every Canadian, whether you're buying or selling goods, or involved in any kind of service sector.

We started this process right after this Parliament started. We heard from many witnesses in Ottawa, and of course, we're going to go right across the country. We're going to do central Canada in a couple of weeks' time. We're doing Atlantic Canada in the fall. We're also going to Skype with the territories. We'll also continue to hear from other countries and other Canadians in Ottawa.

Since there was such a groundswell of interest in TPP, we have been taking submissions from the general public. I think we have over 10,000 right now, and we extended the deadline until the end of June for those submissions.

Also, we're going to be sending a notice to all members of Parliament because of the interest in the TPP, to encourage them to have town hall meetings over the next few months. We're going to give them until the end of July to put in their submissions on what they're hearing on the ground level at their town hall meetings.

When this is all pulled together, our committee will sit down and do a report with all our findings, probably later in the fall. We're hoping to have a report to the House of Commons for MPs to look at by the end of the year. They will see that at the first of the year as they go forward in dealing with the TPP and how we're going to deal with it in the House of Commons. That's how we're operating.

We're going to start off with our witnesses today. We have with us Todd Burns from Cypher. From the Council of Canadians, we have Brigette DePape. I hear it's your first time at a committee. We have Douglas Tingey, also with the Council of Canadians. From the Manitoba Federation of Labour, we have two witnesses: Kevin Rebeck and Anna Rothney.

Welcome, everyone. We have five minutes for each group. If you can keep to five minutes, I would appreciate it. If it goes over, I'll have to put my hand up, but try doing the five minutes so we can give lots of time for dialogue between members and you.

We'll start off with Cypher. Go ahead, sir.

[Todd Burns, President, Cypher Environmental Ltd.]

Thanks for the invite. For those of you who don't know, Cypher Environmental does long-term soil stabilization, dust control, and water remediation technologies. Probably our sales would be in the range of maybe 80% exporting on average, so, of course, my little spiel today is going to be with respect to the benefits of the TPP that we feel we would see in terms of our ability to continue to have a strong push in exporting.

If you take a look, for example, at just how the TPP would affect the Canadian economy, you look at commodity prices, for example, which have a big impact on Canada's economy in terms of mining, oil, and gas, and how healthy those industries are in terms of supporting our economy. They fluctuate quite a bit. Actually, we just reposted a little story on our website about the five-year bear mining market coming to an end, so it looks like things are on the up and up for mining.

But one thing I think that we can do as Canadians in terms of continuing to support the economy is support our exporters. Whatever we can do to make that stronger, regardless of what's happening with different commodity prices and so on.... Exporting is a great way to continue to bring money into the country, to create tax revenue, and so on. While this is a generic comment on free trade agreements in general, when you look at the stats, I think it's 40% of the world's economy that the TPP is supporting.

Japan is one country of particular interest to us, where we have a new distributor performing modestly. We don't really sell our products based on price, it's mostly on performance, but of course, being environmental products, you have to spend a little bit of a premium sometimes to use them. Any way in which we can make them more competitively priced in the market is going to help. Reducing some duties that would be in place in a market like Japan, for example, where we've only seen modest growth with our new distributors there, would give us a general push in the right direction.

Of course I'm a little bit biased coming from a company that's very heavily exposed in terms of exporting, but I think I can probably speak on behalf of a lot of the members of organizations we belong to, like the CME, the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. We're a customer of EDC, Export Development Canada. We work very closely with both of those organizations, and I think probably the general consensus from both of those organizations and all their members would be that we would be in support of the TPP simply for what it can do to help continue our push to export and bring in new revenues for the country.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir, and thank you for that concise report to us.

Now we're going to move over to the Council of Canadians with Brigette DePape.

You're up for five minutes.

[Brigette DePape, Regional Organizer, Prairies, The Council of Canadians]

Hi. My name is Brigette. I'm the Prairies regional organizer with the Council of Canadians.

[Douglas Tingey, Member, The Council of Canadians]

My name is Doug Tingey. I'm a member of the council's Winnipeg chapter and a business lawyer with a background in international trade and foreign investment. I spent nearly 20 years in southeast Asia as a foreign investment adviser, but very little of what I'm going to say relates to that. If you are curious about what an out-in-the-field perspective is like, perhaps we can get into that later with questions.

[Brigette DePape]

Thank you for having us. I want to acknowledge the indigenous territories that we are gathered on and thank those who are protecting them.

We are here because we are concerned that this deal would be a major loss for the environment, jobs, and good public policy-making. Our concerns include increased drug costs, a global race to the bottom in wages, reducing environmental protection and indigenous sovereignty, encouraging a carbon-intensive economy, and undermining community and government efforts to buy local.

Here are some concerns we would like to highlight.

In terms of the environment, ISDS causes concern for much-needed action on climate change. We are concerned about the community of Lelu Island, for example, as we described in a recent Winnipeg Free Press article. If the government decides to be smart and compassionate and to stand with indigenous communities defending the earth and future generations from oil and gas development, they could be sued with ISDS. This puts pressure on Canada to side with corporations and interferes with public policy-making.

Maude Barlow pointed out in the article “When Corporations Sue Countries, No One Wins” that “policymaking in the public interest is curtailed by ISDS.” She illustrates this with TransCanada's recent suit brought against the United States because its government chose to protect water and the environment by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.

As Canadians, we have been the targets of ISDS. According to Barlow:

Canada has been subject to 35 NAFTA claims, with 63 per cent of them challenging environmental protection or resource management measures. As the most-sued developed country in the world under ISDS, Canada faces $2.6 billion in ISDS claims.

This trade deal disempowers our people in Canada and across the globe and puts more power in the hands of corporate investors at a time in history when the survival of humanity depends on empowering people and governments to make good decisions.

In terms of the economy, a recent study predicts the loss of 58,000 jobs. Farmers in particular could lose out, as well as our auto workers.

In terms of labour rights, we are also concerned about the impacts for temporary foreign workers, that they could come for six months, their labour be exploited, and they then be forced to leave.

We want to share a letter from the Council of Canadians to the government, which outlines some key ways forward, including a comprehensive analysis of the TPP, and public hearings and consultations with indigenous communities; that no agreement can be ratified without full consent; that ISDS must be nixed from the TPP and any future agreement be protected from it; and also the removal of health care and pharmaceuticals from the TPP.

An agreement is only one if we agree to it, and it is clear that people do not agree. More than 170,000 people signed our petition with like-minded groups, which we are also sharing here.

As we face the overlapping crises of climate change, economic inequality, and racism, what we need right now is not a trade deal that puts us further on this path, but rather investments in community-led transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies, and more power for the public in decision-making, not less.