Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Elisabeth Rowley. I'm the leader of the Communist Party of Canada. We will be making a submission to you before June 30 in writing, but I'm here today to urge the government and urge all parliamentarians to stand up for Canada and to refuse to ratify the deal.
This is a very bad deal for Canada. It's probably a very good deal for multinational corporations, but it's a bad deal for the public interest, it's a bad deal for workers, for women, for farmers, for indigenous peoples, for people who are concerned about the environment—for Canada. This a secret deal, furthermore. As someone mentioned, it's been in negotiations for eight years, but the public didn't know anything about it until quite recently. In fact, the latest polls show that half of Canadians don't know anything about it. But this is a huge deal that will affect every aspect of life. Why hasn't the government and why hasn't Parliament taken this to Canadians to ask them what they think about it? The answer, I think, is because it is so heavily weighted to the interests of for-profit corporations that they know that the public would oppose it.
There were demonstrations across the country at your hearings. Surely you must be aware that there is very widespread public concern and opposition to this deal. At the very least this means there should be a prolonged period of discussion with the public so that people can do more than stand at the microphone for two minutes to express their views about this.
In the interests of Canadian sovereignly and independence, protection of our environment, respect for the rights of indigenous peoples, creating jobs in the secondary industries and manufacturing, instead of destroying them in the interests of protecting medicare and social programs, which will be on the block and subject to investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms in which we are going to see big box stores replace public health care and other public services that—