Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
I will cut it short because some of my points have been brought up by other people and I don't think I need to repeat them.
I would like to state that free and fair trade can only occur between countries with shared values. The countries involved need to share the following: ecosystems with similar human rights; workers' rights and freedoms, including the right to organize unions; fair and equitable wages for all workers; contract laws that have easily enforced provisions that can be equitably settled in a fair court system; and finally, child labour laws. Right now many of these countries have child labour laws that are not enforced and are pandemic in many regions of their countries, even if they have laws on their books.
Many of the countries in the TPP do not meet these standards, and as such, I'm suggesting that we cannot support this agreement in its current form.
Number two, the U.S. is Canada's largest trading partner and its most important trading partner. The U.S. Congress has stated that it will not pass the TPP, and both presidential nominees—Donald Trump and, it's assumed, Hillary Clinton—have stated that they will not sign the current TPP agreement. That said, if Canada were to sign the TPP agreement and the United States did not sign the TPP agreement, it would put us at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis our major trading partner in that many of the other countries in the TPP, if we were part of the TPP, could then come in and undercut our major trading partner with our Canada-U.S. free trade agreement.
Thank you very much.