International Trade Committee on Sept. 28th, 2016

[Bill Hynd]

No, I don't see any real balance there. As I say, when I think of our commitment under Paris climate change, there's probably no more serious issue facing humankind than climate change. Yet here we have now a Canadian corporation suing the U.S. government for $15 billion. I just think this has gotten out of hand.

Now, a company, if their profits are expropriated, should be able to claim equal value. But to all of a sudden claim for future losses of profit of $15 billion when we're trying to advance a climate change deal that the world signed on to, then, yes, I have real problems with how we're moving forward. I just believe, like Stiglitz and many others, the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism has to go.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Butler and Mr. Sullivan, one issue that comes to mind is food processing. Do you have any concerns about safety when it comes to labelling food?

[Martin Sullivan]

Not really, because I think in a lot of cases the food safety requirements of customers are higher than the minimum requirements imposed by countries. Our experience is that we have third-party audits by independent organizations of our food factories and vessels, and we get levels of approval that are higher than the national standards even of Canada. That gets regulated very well in the market.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

I'm not concerned about Canadian food; I'm concerned about the other TPP countries. Let's say a TPP country, the exporting country, says their safety is equivalent to Canada's safety. Would you be satisfied by that statement or would you like to see more when it comes to labelling?

[Martin Sullivan]

Of course, when product get imported into Canada, it still falls under the requirements of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which has very high standards. If they don't meet those standards, they can be rejected at the border.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

So the TPP takes care of that?

[Martin Sullivan]

I don't think that will be a big concern, because the regulatory environment we have in Canada is at a very high level compared with around the world.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Your time is up.

We're going to move on to our last questioner.

Mr. Ritz, you have five minutes. Go ahead, sir.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations. The one thing you have in common, even though you differ on the issues, is that you're very passionate. We welcome that and thank you for it.

Mr. Butler already corrected Mr. Kavanagh on the Abitibi thing, so I won't do that, but I will make a comment on the whole secretive nature of the TPP and other trade agreements. There was the ability to sign a non-disclosure, and hundreds of individuals and businesses took advantage of that. They were briefed on the day-by-day, issue-by-issue basis that pertained to them. That was available to people. No governments negotiate through public, through media, or whatever. We're seeing that right now with health care. We're seeing it with Petronas moving forward with the LNG. It's not done in the public purview because it just can't be. So there was the ability to sign those non-disclosures and move forward.

I want to move on to you, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Butler. Thank you for your presentations. I understand that you're coming at it from the tariff only, but there is certainly overview on labour standards and environmental standards that will pertain to you as you go into foreign countries and here. It really levels the playing field on a lot of the ancillary parts to a trade agreement.

Would you be interested in making investments, to move forward into the world economy, if they weren't secured?

[Martin Sullivan]

That would make it extremely difficult, of course.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Exactly.

[Martin Sullivan]

As we've traded with countries, like China, for example, sure they have a lot of questionable practices, but we've seen that the wages of people have increased more than 10-fold since we started trading with them back in the early 2000s.

Trade agreements may not be perfect, and there are concerns, but when you look at it in balance, can we have some impact in those countries in terms of increasing how they look at things, changing their view? I think we have a significant impact. I travel quite a lot in Asia and a lot of these countries, and I've seen a dramatic change in China, as an example, and in some of the other Southeast Asian nations as a result of opening up trade.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

That builds on the question that Ms. Ludwig asked about in terms of the social morals of Canada being exported to these partner nations. I see it as well. I've made those same trips. I'm not sure if we've crossed paths over there or not, but I think we have. Derek and I have, I'm sure.

[Martin Sullivan]

Yes, I think we might have once or twice.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

I've always said that trade stability and predictability drives investment, drives efficiency, and drives innovation. You guys are living proof of that in the expansions you've done. You also need to have diversity in your trade portfolio, the same as you need to have diversity in your investment portfolio.

By dealing with more countries, as you rightly point out, Martin, instead of selling everything to the U.S., you keep the U.S. honest, because you're dealing with six other nations as well that are also looking for your product. So that builds strength into Canada. In order to pay for health care costs and all the social costs in this country, you need to have taxpayers who are paying taxes. When you're driving up the rural economy in Newfoundland by doing all of this, of course, you're setting the stage to be offering all of those social programs. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy at the end of the day.

The one other point I wanted to make is that we hear a lot that trade agreements have done nothing, that everything is stagnant. Yet I think it was you, Martin, making the point, and Derek to a certain extent too, that in every trade deal we've made you've seen positive steps coming out of that, incremental at times, but always positive steps.

I would like you to build on that a bit, because we're hearing about Tufts University—it's American, and that was their study—and 58,000 jobs being lost, but they never start to look at the positive side. We're hearing from a lot of small businesses. One young fellow today increased his by 25%. It was only one, but it was 25%. It's about the ability to build your footprint.

[Martin Sullivan]

There are so many examples that we've experienced in the U.S. market, in Europe, and Asia. As we broaden our trade horizon, as I said earlier we get much more leverage to deal with and to get better value. That's what it's all about, really. We have a finite amount of fish and we want to get the most money we can for it so fishermen, employees, and businesses can share.

Really, that's what we've experienced in every single area where we've expanded trade.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

You also made the point that we have to sell out in the world what they want, not what we have, and I totally agree with you. We've set up a Canadian centre of excellence for beef, and we've done it with pork so that they can actually bring people in.

When we talk about exchanges of labour, are you guys involved with bringing in people who would, say, cut the fish this way, make the fish this way? Are you bringing in experts from, say, the Japanese market to show your processors how they want it done?

[Martin Sullivan]

Yes, we'll have technicians, for example, if we have to do new products. We started with sea cucumber, for example, for Asia a couple of years ago. We would bring in experts from those areas to train our people to produce it in the proper way and to the proper specifications. That's a normal part of our trade activity.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Then you would send experts from Canada into these markets to help develop the markets. That's what the whole trade exchange is about: people with the expertise to further that trade. It's not a bad thing; we're not going to flood anybody with workers going back and forth. It's all this expertise.

[Martin Sullivan]

That's right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, Mr. Ritz. Your time is up.

That ends this panel. We're pretty well on time. I would like to thank very much the panellists for coming in here and the good exchange we had with the MPs. If there is anything that you're thinking about, or you couldn't get conveyed, we will take more submissions from you. Our clerk is here. We are going to be taking all submissions to the end of October, and then we're going to go to our report.

Thank you again for taking the time to come here. We really appreciate it.

We'll only break for about five minutes, because we're on a tight schedule. Don't go too far.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Welcome, sir, and welcome to everybody else who just came in.

This is the last of our panel and we'll continue now with our study on TPP. We've done most of the provinces and dealt with the territories, and we've had a lot of submissions from individuals. It is over 20,000 emails now, almost 300 witnesses, and 130 briefs. It's a big undertaking and we'll be doing this until the end of October, then we'll put a report together and present it to Parliament.

As you're well aware, Mr. Taylor, it's a big agreement. It's 40% of the GDP, it's 12 countries, and 800 million people. I think it's one of those agreements that one way or another is going to affect all Canadians, some maybe more positive than others, but our job is to listen to Canadians. We'll have an open-mike session after this. I think with all the goings-on in the United States, trade has become more of a topic now than it ever was before.

Without further ado, sir, you have five minutes. If you can keep it around that, we'd appreciate it. Then we'll open with dialogue from the MPs.

Go ahead.

[Ron Taylor, Chief Executive Officer, Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries]

Thank you very much.

I'm Ron Taylor, the CEO of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries. I want to thank you all for inviting us to come here today.

I find it interesting, because being in the technology sector I get to travel all over the world and I see various levels of security. I think in the 14 years living here in St. John's, it's the first time I've seen this level of security here. It was kind of interesting seeing that here. I'm certainly used to it, because I go to a lot of places where I don't get through the front door because it's bullet-proof glass, but it's interesting to see it in my own backyard.

Thank you very much for inviting us here. International trade is very much a part of the technology sector here in Newfoundland and Labrador. We've seen some exponential growth in the last number of years.

I'll tell you a little about what we do and what we affect. We oversee about 165 or 170 companies here in Newfoundland and Labrador. Annual sales are about $1.6 billion a year. Interestingly enough, 10 years ago that was $460 million. We're looking for that to double again in the next 10 years. Most of that is coming from outside of Canada. In a lot of cases it's coming from outside of North America. As far as international trade, if you're a technology company in Canada and don't have access to international markets, well, you're not going to grow very much.

In terms of open trade, obviously, if you've been around a long enough time you go back to the NAFTA days and some of the apprehension that was felt by people at that time, the sky was going to fall and the Americans were going to come and take us over with NAFTA. Of course, that didn't happen. As a matter of fact, a lot of people say today that Canada certainly saw some real benefits of being part of NAFTA.

I think we take the same approach with both TPP and CETA—you know I'm going to talk about that today—in the sense of open trade and the lowering of the barriers and tariffs. I understand that about 18,000 barriers and tariffs are being lowered here. It has a huge effect for us. When you're with a sector where most of its trade is outside of the country, being able to not have to deal with these types of challenges makes life a lot easier for us.

We're fortunate enough in that we're in a part of the world that can be a little bit challenging, moving goods back and forth, but with technology we don't have those impediments. As such, our sector has grown quite a bit and we continue to see that kind of growth.

If we look at some of the tech giants that are out there, the Apples, the Googles, the Facebooks of the world, they all support TPP. The fact of open border trade with easier access to markets plays a huge part. The fact that the TPP will protect things like....will restrict governments from throttling data on us, and will not allow governments to say that we have to store the data in any particular place, which leaves us open to using the cloud as much as possible, is definitely a benefit to us.

From a technology standpoint, from what we're doing as an organization, I realize some of the details are still forthcoming, but from what we see and from talking to some of the larger technology players out there in North America, this seems to be very, very much in our best interests. As a technology community, we don't really see anything that causes us any concern. We like the idea of open markets. We like the idea of people coming here. We don't see foreign companies coming in to Newfoundland and Labrador in the tech sector as an impediment, we look upon it as a partnership and an opportunity.

From the standpoint of our organization, our membership, we certainly support this initiative.

[The Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Thank you, sir.

I know you mentioned the security. It's no reflection on the people of Newfoundland or on the trust; it's just a sign of the times with the House of Commons. That's the way it is. Wherever we go, we need to have the same amount of security. That's just the way it is. You realize too, in your travels around the world, that it's a different place right now.

[Ron Taylor]

I grew up in downtown Toronto. I'm used to things being a little dodgy in some places. Moving here a dozen years ago, it's certainly not the norm. But I appreciate where you're coming from.