International Trade Committee on May 13th, 2016

[Malcolm Buchanan]

The minister's office has responded, and is not to the satisfaction of CURC. I have provided that material to the clerk so members of the committee can see it.

In conclusion, CURC echoes the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who said, “Canada should reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement because it is a flawed trade agreement that benefits big business at the expense of the working people.”

Chairman, I have the material I have submitted through you, and I have backup materials on one of those points I made.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir, and thank you for being so organized and being on time. We appreciate it.

We're going to move on to Martinrea, with Mr. Wildeboer.

Go ahead, sir, five minutes.

[Rob Wildeboer, Executive Chairman, Martinrea International Inc.]

Thanks very much.

I provided some written materials to you, I believe, when I was asked to comment on the TPP when it was announced last fall. I worked with the governments at the provincial and federal levels and also made some public comments. I'm happy to read them into the record again.

The reality is that if there is a TPP, we have to be in it if our trading partners are in it. To not be in it is suicidal. I believe you've heard comments from Flavio Volpe, the president of the APMA, and some other people in the auto parts industry as well as the automotive industry. I think their position is relatively similar on that. It's not a perfect agreement, but if it's there, we have to be there. I'm not too fussed about quotas. Canadian companies are very competitive. We can compete with anyone in the world.

What I would say, just in terms of our company, is that we're an auto parts supplier that 15 years ago had zero revenues. We now have $4 billion in revenues. We had zero employees. We now have 14,000. Our head office is in Canada. We employ 3,000 Canadians. Some are union and some are non-union. We're a leading manufacturer. What we have to do in order to compete is that we have to be where our customers are, and we compete well. In the various lines of our business, I believe we've been the fastest-growing auto parts company on a percentage basis in North America over that time frame. We know how to compete. We have huge faith in Canada.

When we win work for our customers in different places, we set up plants near them, because we make big stuff that has to be close to our assembly plants. We have to be competitive or we don't win work. We compete against the Chinese and the Japanese, and against people in the United States and people in Europe. I think our growth shows that we can compete pretty well, just as Canadians do when we're given the opportunity to compete.

Because our head office is here, we finance here, our shareholders are here—we're a public company—and we tend to like to do our R and D here. We tend to use Canadian tool and die makers wherever we can, and automation people, and we export that across the world. We, along with other companies such as Magna and Linamar, which have grown considerably internationally, are very happy to have our head offices here, where we support a lot of people. It's a very important industry for us.

Free trade has been good for us because it has given us access in different places, and if we win jobs elsewhere, it creates and preserves jobs here. Anyone who looks at job numbers has to take that into account. Head office jobs are very good jobs. R and D jobs are very good jobs. Design jobs, tool and die maker jobs, automation jobs, high-tech jobs, accounting jobs, legal jobs, and finance jobs are all very important jobs here.

In terms of the auto industry, I want to talk very briefly about it because it's my perspective. We are part of an international industry. It's the second-largest industry in the world next to construction. It's a leading-edge innovation industry. I believe I've provided you our “Call for Action” materials.

I'm co-chair of the investment committee of CAPC, the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council. Minister Bains is part of that, as are the Ontario government and the Quebec government. My co-chair is Ray Tanguay, the former president of Toyota Canada, who has done a pretty good job of attracting two large assembly plants to Ontario that have created a lot of jobs with a lot of spinoff effects. I am also the chair of the CEO Manufacturing Advisory Council of the CME, which includes a number of companies that employ a lot of people here in Canada. We advise the Prime Minister and the Ontario Premier on policies such as manufacturing.

In order for us to be involved in trade, we need to have stuff to trade. We have to make stuff here. Manufacturing jobs are incredibly important for us, and our ability to make stuff is incredibly important. I happen to represent manufacturing in general but also the auto industry in particular. In order for us to have a healthy auto industry, where we've punched above our weight for many years, we need to have assembly plants.

We're spending a lot of time with your government and different parties in talking about the importance of having assembly plants in Canada so that we can have a supply base here. As I indicated, we will go to where our assembly plants are located in terms of our customers. We want them to be here. That means we have to work together. I'm talking to a number of elected representatives here. It's a real privilege to do so and I commend you for all your work, but we have to recognize the importance of supporting manufacturing and supporting the automotive industry in Canada.

To give you a sense of this, every assembly job creates anywhere from seven to 10 jobs that supply a multiplier effect that in an advanced technology business such as that is unbelievable. We're the greatest customer of Dofasco or ArcelorMittal. ArcelorMittal, with the iron ore it pulls from northern Quebec, is the largest employer of native Canadians in northern Quebec.

There's a supply chain like you wouldn't believe that supports everything. I would commend us on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Mr. Wildeboer, if you could wrap up, I'd appreciate it.

[Rob Wildeboer]

I'm ready for questions. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir, and thank you for that presentation. It was very informative.

We have one more witness here, Dr. Lexchin.

Go ahead, sir.

[Dr. Joel Lexchin, Professor, School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health, York University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

My name is Joel Lexchin. I teach health policy at York University, and I work at the University Health Network as an emergency physician.

I'm going to comment about the possible implications of the TPP on drug regulation and prices. There are five separate chapters or annexes that could potentially affect these areas.

The first one is the technical barriers to trade, which contains laws on transparency, regulatory harmonization, and acceptable marketing approval processes that could entrench the views of foreign governments. For instance, one of the articles in this chapter gives foreign governments the right to comment on Canadian regulatory approval standards. That doesn't mean they're going to change, but there's certainly the potential for that.

There is also no guarantee that, if standards are harmonized, they're going to be harmonized upwards rather than downwards. For instance, one of the articles gives Health Canada the right to retain secrecy around its reports on inspection of manufacturing facilities, rather than making those public.

The article on intellectual property has provisions around both data exclusivity and patent term extension. Those won't affect Canada too much, because we've already given away patent term extension with the CETA, and our data exclusivity currently meets the TPP standards. However, the TPP means that these are going to be locked in, because it requires the agreement of all of the signatories to change any of the provisions. If Canada at some point in the future wanted to roll back data exclusivity or roll back patent extension, we would need the agreement of all of the signatories of this agreement.

The chapter on transparency and anti-corruption could also have negative effects, potentially on drug costs. Currently, we don't have a national pharmacare plan. There's debate going on about that. If we do develop one, then this article could become effective and limit our abilities to control expenditures.

You've already heard briefly about the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. We have that already through NAFTA. That applies to U.S. companies. Eli Lilly is using it to challenge the court's revocation of patents on two of Eli Lilly's drugs. The TPP will open up the ISDS mechanism to Japanese companies.

Beyond these risks I've outlined, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is not happy with what it got out of the TPP. A U.S. diplomat at another forum was commenting on this and said that the U.S. industry did not get everything that it wanted, so there is also the strong potential that U.S. drug companies will try to push the limits of the TPP, and that could further affect how we regulate and price our medications.

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir, and thank you for being on time.

Now that all the panellists have given their briefs, we're going to move on to dialogue with the MPs.

Starting off, we have Mr. Van Kesteren from the Conservative Party for five minutes.

Go ahead, sir.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Thank you, Chair. Thank you all for coming here.

I'm going to start with Mr. Schneiderman. I'm not going to go toe-to-toe with you. You're a law professor, and I'm just a farm boy from southwestern Ontario, so I'm not so crazy to do that.

I'm just going to ask you one question. Is there consensus with your peers? Do they all agree with your position? Let me just ask you that.

[Prof. David Schneiderman]

Of course not. ISDS is a flashpoint for political debate.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

That's good, that's all I want to know.

I reasonably expect we could get somebody else who would have an opposing opinion.

[Prof. David Schneiderman]

Let me respond to that.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Not too long. I have five minutes.

[Prof. David Schneiderman]

I promise not to.

You'll notice that I did not use any hyperbole or talking points. I used evidence and text in the TPP. That's all I wanted to talk about with you.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

No, you didn't, and that's fair. You did say “this could happen” and “that could happen”.

Likewise, Mr. Lexchin, would you agree there may be somebody in your field who would say, “Well, Joel, I disagree with you”?

[Dr. Joel Lexchin]

They might disagree. They'd be wrong, but....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

I like that.

[Dr. Joel Lexchin]

This kind of thing is being debated heavily in the United States, in Australia, and in New Zealand, so yes, sure.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

That's fair.

Mr. Buchanan, you represent how many retired people?

[Malcolm Buchanan]

Approximately 500,000.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

That's a lot. You must have a pulse on the retirement funds. How are they performing of late?

[Malcolm Buchanan]

Well, I can talk personally to the one I belong to and that's the Ontario pension plan. It's very sound. It goes up and down a little. Some of our members have had to pay increased premiums. Some have lost indexing, but we got it back, and that was through hard negotiations. They are performing reasonably well because they diversify their funds.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

That's a good thing. I'm glad, because if you were managing my pension plan, that's exactly what I'd want to hear.

I don't know if you're responsible for this, but you would agree it's important to pick winners, people who are going to perform, so that your investment's going to have a return. Would that be a fair analysis?

[Malcolm Buchanan]

I smell a trap question in this.