First, let me thank the committee for allowing the Social Justice Cooperative to present.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being sold as another free trade agreement that will expand trade opportunities and thereby help economies grow. If only.
The trickle-down impact, we are told, will lead to increased economic activity and more jobs for everyone. If reducing tariffs and increasing trade was the start and end of this agreement, I am sure the opposition to the TPP would be much more muted. However, any serious cost-benefit analysis of the TPP will tell you that social, environmental, and political costs are simply too great, and the economic benefits limited.
At its core, TPP is less about increasing trade and more about securing corporate investor rights. That is why there is such strong opposition from people like Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist. In a recent CBC interview, Mr. Stiglitz called the TPP the worst trade deal ever, and he called on Canada to demand renegotiation. The problem is that renegotiation is not part of the equation or on the table as a possibility. Stiglitz has also co-signed a letter with 200 of the U.S.A.'s leading law and economic professors, and gone to the U.S. Congress opposing the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement, ISDS. These scholars are firmly opposed to the inclusion of such a regime because it creates a parallel legal system granting multinational corporations undue power.
A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Trudeau hosted a Global Fund replenishment conference to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The Prime Minister's website explains the Global Fund this way:
By uniting around a common vision of a better and healthier future, the international community can fight diseases more effectively, and tackle the associated issues—including poverty, lack of access to education, and social and political inequality—which disproportionately impact women, girls, and young people.
Our Prime Minister should be congratulated for his vigorous support of this worthy effort. However, his concern for the Global Fund does not square with the government's support for the TPP. Doctors Without Borders, one of the most prestigious medical humanitarian organizations in the world, has called TPP one of the worst trade pacts for restricting access to affordable life-saving medicines for millions of the world's poorest people. Doctors Without Borders depends on accessing generics to treat people with HIV, TB, malaria, and other infectious diseases. The new intellectual property rules will see them lengthened and strengthened, and they'll allow for new patent and data protections for pharmaceuticals. This will only lead to higher prices and could affect thousands or millions of desperate people who need access to generics.
It's our view that public health needs should trump commercial greed.
Bringing it back to Canada, Canada is the only developed country with a universal health care system that does not provide national coverage of prescription drugs. Canada has the second-highest per capita drug costs in the world. There are simply too many personal stories of sick people who have had to forgo their prescriptions simply because they could not afford them. For far too many, the choice is food or medicine.
Canada needs an affordable pharmacare program that makes available selected medicines at little or no direct cost to patients in need. Canada should not be supporting any deal that will force extended intellectual property provisions, including patent and data protection, which, for the general populace, will mean higher drug costs. Research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has estimated that Canada could add $636 million annually to the price of drugs in Canada, and Canada should not be signing any deal that ratchets up the ISDS, that allows pharmaceutical companies to bypass Canadian courts and take their case to a non-judicial arbitration process. How can it be that government has no right to bring a claim against a foreign investor, yet foreign investors are granted the power to sue sovereign nations?