Good afternoon.
Thank you for inviting me to appear on behalf of the Trade Justice Network.
We're 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, United Steelworkers, Climate Action Network Canada, The Council of Canadians, the National Union of Public and General Employees, Communication Workers of America, the National Farmers Union and many other groups that represent people in Canada from all walks of life.
I was a part of the CETA negotiations and I'm quite concerned about the regulatory co-operation that we had in CETA being ported over to the U.K. Regulatory co-operation has been a central part of updates to NAFTA and CETA, locking in Canada's current approach to regulating. We should be particularly cautious here, as well, that we are able to maintain the freedom to respond appropriately to future crises in health, climate and the economic fallout of those crises.
Our current approach gives multinational industrial interests several entry points into Canada's regulatory system, which is not advantageous to Canadian workers, consumers or businesses.
Besides increased transparency, one of the key changes we would like to see is allowing for the use of the precautionary principle as EU nations already do.
We also have significant concerns about how previous and ongoing privatization of public services in Canadian provinces will interact with a new U.K. deal to lock these changes in with something we call “ratchet” and “standstill” clauses. We think that in a future U.K. deal, public services should be entirely exempt from parts of the deal, so it wouldn't be restricting governments in any way from developing new public services or repatriating privatized public services.
The new standard we had set with CUSMA is that ISDS and other investor-state dispute settlement courts are unnecessary and, in fact, harmful. We expect that in the future Canada-U.K. deal, we won't need the investor-state port that we have been developing in CETA.
In general, we feel that trade and investment should be viewed as a means to enhance material and social well-being, not an end in its own right. Proposals for a progressive trade agenda should be judged against four principles. The first is human rights in the broadest sense, including economic, social, cultural and environmental rights. These should have primacy over corporate and investor rights. There needs to be legally binding obligations to the responsibilities of transnational corporations to recognize those rights.
Next, democratic government must have the policy space to pursue and prioritize local and national economic development, good jobs for citizens and the preservation, promotion and restoration of public services.
Citizens, communities and the environment have the right to protection through public interest regulation. A climate-friendly approach should be adopted whenever pursuing trade and investment, which can no longer be allowed to outpace the carrying capacity of our planet.
Finally, we think it's important to think about how our trade policy fits in with other international commitments such as the sustainable development goals, SDGs, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
If we take our commitments to the SDGs seriously, before finalizing any deal, we would do an impact assessment of the social and economic consequences the agreement will have on participating nations' ability to progress toward the SDGs. In implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we should consider what that means for including first nations, Inuit and Métis people at the bargaining table for international trade negotiation.
We're looking forward to seeing increased transparency in the negotiation of this new trade deal. That would include increased data availability from the economic report they have done. We're also looking at seeing an independent analysis of the deal's impact on our economy and our legislative and regulatory frameworks.
Thank you.