Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for having me.
My name is Jesse Whattam, and I'm here representing the Trade Justice Network, which is a coalition of environmental, civil society, student, indigenous, cultural, farming, labour and social justice organizations that came together in 2010 to call for a new global trade regime founded on social justice, human rights and environmental sustainability.
To name some of our members, they include the Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor, Canadian Union of Public Employees, United Steelworkers, and the Climate Action Network, just to name a few.
The World Trade Organization has failed to serve Canada or create a better, fairer world for all, and the Trade Justice Network welcomes the calls for fundamental reform. For three decades, the regime of hyperglobalized trade investment and supply chains via the World Trade Organization has empowered pharmaceutical, agribusiness, financial and other corporate interests in high-income countries to dominate economies to the detriment of national and local economies, workers, farmers, indigenous peoples, our health and the environment.
In the past three decades, despite increased global economic integration, the numbers of the world poor have increased absolutely and relatively. Without a labour protection floor, we've seen repressed wage growth and increased precarious work. The climate and economic crises have been ignored or needed solutions have been constrained by trade rules. There has been a rise in inequality within and between nations as governments have been stripped of essential tools to pursue the well-being of their peoples.
This is why the WTO is facing an existential crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further exposed the inequality and instability of the current WTO regime. It's time for change.
I'm going to focus my comments on the inequity of power at the WTO, regulatory practices and the dispute settlement mechanisms.
The reality is that while the WTO is supposed to be governed by its 164 members, it's actually managed by its most powerful members. The EU and the U.S., along with most western OECD countries, have remained dominant and set the global rules of importance to multinational capital that have never been mutually beneficial for developing countries. This especially played out when rich countries sidelined the Doha development round priorities while pursuing an explosion of bilateral agreements and plurilateralism at the WTO, which was then foisted on developing countries. The interests of developing countries and the poorest communities and low-wage workers everywhere have been marginalized in many of these new negotiations.
In the realm of domestic regulation, corporate interests have lobbied successfully for deregulation through the current trade regime. Further, dispute settlement mechanisms and other explicit constraints in the WTO and free trade agreements prohibit high standards of public and environmental protection. While claiming that domestic regulation maintains the ability of member countries to regulate in the public interest and facilitate increased trade, in reality there's an inherent tension between the domestic regulatory space and trade liberalization.
While the language in the General Agreement on Trade in Services recognizes the sovereign right to regulate, it does not preclude a challenge against a state on the grounds that it administered a regulation that did not fulfill its standards and the criteria set under international instruments, such as the WTO law. In effect, such questioning of domestic regulations via the WTO dispute settlement mechanisms and based on international disciplines and standards challenges the boundaries of the state's regulatory space and the role of its regulatory authorities.
Since the founding of the WTO, regulatory barriers to trade have been at the top of the priority list for multinational corporations. Developed countries, on behalf of their largest industries and exporters, began to complain more loudly that the food and product safety standards, public health measures and environmental protections were creating market inefficiency. Under this pretense of market inefficiency, it has facilitated a deregulation affecting labour rights, consumer products and environmental protections.
Further, international business lobbies have increased their advocacy of so-called regulatory coherence and co-operation, including a right to intervene in the regulatory process as early and as often as possible, hoping to derail or weaken pro-consumer or pro-environment policies and regulations before they're even implemented, avoiding the need to later challenge them.
Right through the pandemic, this has been clear. Negotiations have continued on limiting domestic regulation of the service sector, even as the concentration of service firms is posing a major impediment to timely and cost-effective procurement and distribution of essential goods. Negotiations to limit regulation and vetting of foreign investors continue, despite a clear need for the production of personal protective equipment and medicines to be diversified.
A fundamental transformation should mean that no country should seek or be required to incorporate the so-called good regulatory practice into binding international treaties, as they've been designed to benefit corporate interests and multinational capital while putting democratic decision-making in a stranglehold.
My next point is on the dispute settlement mechanism within the current form of the WTO and trade regime. One of the biggest shifts of the WTO is that countries that try to restrict foreign trade can be more easily sanctioned, most notoriously by giving foreign investors the ability to sue states under the opaque arbitration process. Previous witnesses have spoken about how this current dispute mechanism has hurt Canadian industries.
Just last week, pharmaceutical companies were asking that countries such as Colombia, Chile and others be punished for seeking to ramp up their production of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics without express permission from pharmaceutical companies. Sanctions are being urged by the drug industries, citing alleged threats posed by any effort to challenge basic intellectual property rights. Canada and other high-income nations have refused to sign on to the proposal of the WTO or have delayed approving it. Even in the middle of a global pandemic, the rules of the WTO are prioritizing the profit of multinational corporations over people, especially in the global south.
When it comes to the climate, it is paramount that the WTO and trade rules protect climate policy. WTO trade rules that conflict with climate action should be eliminated to allow communities and governments to advance bold climate protections without the fear of being challenged in trade tribunals. We should not be beholden to agreements, such as the government procurement agreement, that can prohibit, say, renewable power purchasing. A fundamental transformation would align trade policies with climate objectives and enforce commitments to implement international climate accords and to make climate-protecting policy changes.
In conclusion, the WTO has functioned to establish rules for the world economy that mainly benefit large transnational corporations at the expense of national and local economies, workers, farmers, indigenous peoples, our health and the environment. Recently the Trade Justice Network signed on to a global call for WTO reform, which was signed by hundreds of civil society organizations across the world. This call cited the Geneva principles for the global green new deal, where economists, policy-makers, experts and civil society organizations aimed to lay down the foundations of a new multilateralism that builds the rules of the economy towards goals of coordinated stability, shared prosperity, and environmental sustainability while respecting national policy sovereignty.
It's these goals that should shape the WTO reform: people and the planet before profit.
Thank you for having me.