Hi. My name is Randy Emerson. I was born in Windsor and I've lived here all my life. I am treasurer of the Windsor-Essex chapter of the Council of Canadians, a member of an environmental group called Windsor On Watch, and a Unifor 444 member. I am 56 years old and have worked 32 years at the FCA Windsor assembly plant, 11 years as an assembler and 21 years as an electrician.
No doubt you've heard a lot in these hearings about, ISDS, patents, copyright, regulatory standards, etc., but I'm not going to talk about these. Instead, I wish to speak from my heart.
Trade has always been good for Windsor. As Dino said, it's gotten us Ford, Chrysler, and GM plants, and, along with those, well-paying jobs. Free trade has not been good. Free trade has created the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Ford is a former shadow of itself. The Chrysler van plant, Plant 6, is gone, and GM no longer has any presence in this city. A GM transmission plant is in the process of being torn down as I speak. We have low-paying, minimum wage and temporary jobs, for example, call centres. We have more temp agencies than we do Tim Hortons. Our food banks have been considerably stressed; some have even run out of food. My city has had the highest unemployment rate in Canada off and on for over a decade.
Recently, though, it dropped by 3%. Why? Because my plant hired 1,200 people, not because of free trade but in spite of it. All these free trade jobs that we obtained before did nothing for the unemployment rate. Nothing. The call centres did nothing. The rate stayed the same. It was good high-paying manufacturing jobs that did that, and now you want to bring in the TPP.
Another free trade deal will put more pressure on manufacturing jobs. Instead of waking up in the morning and looking at my future retirement with confidence, I wonder if this is the deal that will make my employer pull out of Canada. I wonder if I will lose my pension or just get pennies on the dollar. I ask myself why the federal government refuses to see that their previous trade deals have killed hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada. Free trade has turned Ontario from a have to a have-not province. Why does the federal government not see the devastation free trade has wreaked on working class families? I implore you to turn down this agreement.