Merci beaucoup. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present.
Citizens against CETA is a rather grandiose-sounding name for a local group of concerned citizens. We submitted a brief last June filled with statistics refuting the supposed benefits of the TPP, but today I'd really like to talk to you about values.
In his meticulously researched book on wealth and income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty concluded that we were heading into a period of inequality such that the world had never seen. If we want to change that, he said, we have to bet everything on democracy.
I believe inequality continues to grow precisely because around the globe, democracy is under attack. The aggressors aren't terrorists or rogue nations. The aggressors are international corporations backed by financial elites. The weapon used is a contract.
The TPP and CETA are gigantic contracts that define not what corporations can and can't do in our country. Instead, these contracts define what government itself can and can't do. Any government action, present and future, that is not clearly defined or not written into the contract can be challenged by corporations in those infamous offshore tribunals, where the public good and environmental protection count for nothing. There, it's all about entitlement under the contract.
According to Osgoode Hall investment treaty expert Gus Van Harten, these contractual agreements have succeeded in doing what no parliament has been previously able to do under our English common law system, which is to fetter or straitjacket future parliaments. That is huge.
I believe government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to acknowledging the threat these trade agreements pose for our democratic rights. But then too, I'll acknowledge that so are the passengers in the back seat, and that's the public. The reason in both cases is that we live in an age in which economic values trump everything.
I'm a retired social studies teacher. Around the turn of the century, every single course that allowed a discussion of democracy and politics was deleted from the high school curriculum in this province and was replaced with economic education courses. There was a consequence. In the 2011 federal election, the last election for which we have a breakdown by age, only 29% of our young people aged between18 and 24 years bothered to vote.
I'm going to suggest that the same neglect of our democratic values has happened in government. Economic values now dominate, more precisely the economic values of neo-liberalism with its emphasis on free trade.
This committee now has all sorts of hard evidence—I've read the briefs—disputing the Liberal Party's claims about the benefits of free trade. Two important reports came out last week that I want to highlight. The first was a Tufts University study on CETA. This is a direct quote: “...CETA will cause unemployment, inequality, welfare losses and a reduction of intra-EU trade.” That certainly suggests that CETA is not the gold standard of trade agreements that Prime Minister Trudeau and Minister Freeland maintain it is. Will the Prime Minister and the trade minister now reverse direction and call for a halt to the provisional acceptance of CETA? Well, it all depends, I think, on what their true values are.
The new OECD report that has just come out is even more interesting, in spite of its blinkered call for more trade liberalization. Trade as a driver of GDP has fallen steadily since 2009. In fact, trade growth is now lagging growth in the broader world economy this year. That lag—this is really interesting—is likely to continue, particularly because emerging nations are pulling back from a dependency on exports and choosing instead to develop internal markets as a means of increasing GDP.
As for OECD countries, governments are increasingly being forced by their citizens to question the benefits of a free trade model that has heightened inequality, caused job losses, and straitjacketed government's ability to deal with either.
Consider the way the TPP unexpectedly became a campaign issue in the U.S. elections. Consider Brexit, or last week when 320,000 Germans in multiple cities demonstrated in the streets against the TPP and CETA.
You know, these will not be isolated incidents. According to the OECD report, election results and polls in OECD countries are pointing to a shift away from the traditional left-right divide amongst voters and toward anti-globalization and pro-globalization electorates. That's a very significant development for you to consider.
As members of the trade committee, you hold I think an enormous responsibility, and I know how hard you are working. I'm sure you've been watching closely how public opinion and the research against these trade agreements are developing everywhere. But you're also affected by the unwavering ideological enthusiasm that those who control policy in our two major parties still have for free trade.