Thank you very much.
I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to appear here on behalf of the Trade Justice Network. We are a coalition of environmental, civil society, student, indigenous, cultural, farming, labour and social justice organizations. We came together in 2010 to call for a new global trade regime founded on social justice, human rights and environmental sustainability.
Our members include the Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the United Steelworkers, the Climate Action Network of Canada, the National Farmers Union and many other groups who represent people in Canada from all walks of life.
I will focus my remarks on the role we see international trade deals and policy playing in a just recovery from COVID-19 and ensuring that Canada is well prepared to cope with a future crisis.
First, we have seen the importance of maintaining domestic manufacturing capacity in Canada for a number of essential goods, such as personal protective equipment and vaccines. Buy Canadian procurement policies may be necessary to recover and promote existing companies in Canada with that capacity, so it will be important for federal legislators to keep this mind as they engage in any bilateral trade negotiations or as they have talks within international trade organizations, such as the World Trade Organization.
We also want to make sure that we have the capacity to bring back publicly owned businesses, as in the case of vaccines, that could do this work and make sure our hands are not tied behind our backs because we didn't take this possibility into account.
Regulatory harmonization is a key part of the new NAFTA and CETA, two of our major trade deals. We should be particularly cautious as we proceed here so that we are able to maintain the freedom to respond appropriately to future crises in health, climate and the economic fallout that comes from these crises.
Right now the federal government is exploring what it means to have a feminist foreign policy, and we congratulate it for this. We want to note, though, that it doesn't simply mean token exclusions for women-owned businesses in trade agreements. We want to remind you that gender equity, especially in terms of education and employment, contributes to economic growth. However, the reverse is not true. Economic growth does not, on its own, contribute to gender equality or to improvements in health, welfare or basic rights.
Finally, we think that as we're planning our future in trade, it's important to think about how our trade policy fits with other international commitments, such as the sustainable development goals and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
If we take our commitments to the SDGs seriously, we would do an impact assessment, before finalizing any deal, of the social and economic consequences the agreement will have on participating nations' ability to progress toward the SDGs. Also, in implementing UNDRIP, we should consider what that means for including first nations, Inuit and Métis people at the bargaining table during international trade negotiations.
I'd like to turn the remainder of my time over to Eddy Pérez from Climate Action Canada.