Thank you.
Good afternoon.
I'm afraid that the trans-Pacific partnership will sap whatever is left of our sovereignty. Our government is deliberately giving away our sovereignty to private companies so that they can attack our legislation and take us to secretive courts and challenge our laws and regulations such as the protection of water, the environment, our public services, our health care, our roads and bridges, and our sewer systems.
Consequently, a transnational can sue our government in secret in private courts without recourse should they consider our laws an obstacle to their profits. There are many examples, which I don't have the time to cite here, of compensation that Canada has paid because of challenges to our laws.
For years, our elites kept hammering that globalization and free trade would be a source of employment and prosperity. Upon verification, this has not happened. Canada has lost thousands of well-paid permanent jobs in the manufacturing sector, wages have stagnated, and outsourcing is spreading everywhere, resulting in precarious part-time jobs and an increase in inequalities.
Women are particularly affected by this downward trend, since they are allotted poorer part-time jobs in the service industry. To make things worse, many unemployed workers are excluded from coverage of state benefits.
These international agreements have nothing to do with the public interest. Under TPP, the cost of our medication will skyrocket, our public services will be up for grabs, and our environmental laws will be challenged. Mark my words: had these trade deals existed in the 1980s, asbestos, a cancer-causing product, would not have been banned and its producers would not have been forced to compensate victims.