Mr. Chair, committee members, thank you for inviting us to talk about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
My name is Denis Bolduc and I am the general secretary of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Quebec. With me today is Mathieu Vick from our research branch. We represent over 110,000 workers who deliver the public services all Quebec residents depend on. CUPE is Canada's largest union, with 635,000 members.
CUPE's goal is to protect and improve public services with the aim of creating a more equal and just society, where no one is left behind. With this in mind, we have to recommend that the Government of Canada not ratify the TPP. We all know, of course, that Canada is a trading nation and that international trade is vital to every level of our economy. Good trade agreements put the interests of people ahead of the interests of multinationals, promoting job creation and social development.
But since we know that trade between Canada and the other TPP countries is already 97% tariff-free, this agreement is clearly intended instead to enhance the powers and profits of the largest corporations, to the detriment of workers, governments, taxpayers and all citizens.
Here are a few of the main reasons Canada should reject the TPP.
First of all, the Conservatives negotiated the TPP in secret, without input from the opposition or the general public. The TPP gives foreign multinationals the right to challenge, or even overturn, public policies adopted by democratically elected governments. Take, for instance, Ethyl Corporation, the American company that, under NAFTA, won the repeal of a Canadian law banning MMT, a toxic fuel additive, while at the same time receiving $13 million in compensation.
With its expanded investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), the TPP allows the wealthiest multinationals to sue Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars through a tribunal rife with conflicts of interest. That tribunal, presided over by arbitrators who have a financial interest in interpreting the provisions as broadly as possible, operates entirely outside of our domestic legal system. It cannot be accessed by either Canadian companies or the general public. Canada is already the industrialized country most often sued in the ISDS context. There have already been 35 claims against Canada under the NAFTA mechanism, which operates much like the TPP mechanism, and our country has paid out over $200 million in penalties.
Second, the TPP threatens public services in a number of ways. First of all, there are the ratchet and standstill clauses. The ratchet clause prevents backtracking once a service has been privatized or a standard eliminated, even if the outcome is catastrophic. Under the standstill clause, a government cannot further regulate an industry, or contract-in a privatized service at the time the agreement was implemented.
Both clauses promote privatization and tie the hands of future governments. Shouldn't a government be able to regulate an industry to protect the health of its citizens or meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets? Shouldn't a government have the option of bringing a service back in house if outsourcing costs more and isn't delivering the expected results? Shouldn't it be possible to broaden the scope of a universal service like medicare for the good of our citizens?
Roy Romanow, the premier of Saskatchewan between 1991 and 2001, once said that Canada would never have had its public health care system if NAFTA had been in force in the 1960s. Drug prices will also go up by $800 million per year under the TPP, putting pressure on provincial budgets and on the budgets of large employers that offer drug coverage, which will affect services and may lead to contracting out or layoffs.