Thank you very much, and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you this morning.
Let me start with what I think is a very important point that hasn't been covered yet, which is that when we get into looking at any potential new trade deals labelling is really important.
I remember when the trans-Pacific partnership was a terrible deal and wasn't worth signing on to but when we relabelled it the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, all of a sudden it got to be a good deal.
I think the most important thing is not the content but the label. Perhaps that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it was quite an interesting process to watch. The transformation of the TTP into a good deal by a relabelling of the agreement still puzzles me to this day.
We're facing two crises in Canada and around the world. One is COVID and the other is climate change.
From our point of view, it strikes us that rethinking the whole notion of trade agreements under the wing of these two crises is a very important process, because under COVID, remember, in the early days, we had all kinds of problems because we didn't have enough manufacturing capacity in Canada. We were having to get our personal protective equipment from other countries; the N95 masks had to be manufactured outside of Canada.
The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said we're never going to let that happen again, we're going to develop Canadian manufacturing capacity. Although Mr. Ford and I aren't on the same page on many things, that seems to me to be a very important point. Why would we be relying on other countries for so much of what we need in Canada instead of developing our own capacity? To develop our own capacity, even for protective equipment, it may mean violating some of the terms of the existing trade deal, and we have to accept that. Those trade deals prevent countries from looking after their own economy.
The second is the climate crisis. Does it really still make sense for us to be exporting our resources to other countries so that they can make it into product and sell it back to us, all the while having transportation costs and the cost to the environment of all that trade back and forth? Surely we should be at least revisiting the notion. For us to continue to manufacture a limited number of things and sell them and then import everything else is dangerous to the climate, and surely we should be thinking about that.
While I'm talking about COVID, Mr. Yussuff just mentioned that we need to make sure that we don't have ISDS clauses. I'm sure the committee knows that, as a result of ISDS in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and CETA, we have bucketfuls of cases ready to go. Somebody's shaking their head but that happens to be a fact. I've read from several different law firms about the fact that they have a whole bunch of ISDS cases ready to go against countries that dared to close down their economy under COVID, and they label it. They say that if you had to close down your businesses because of COVID there may be an ISDS case there. If you had rent relief imposed by the government, there may be an ISDS case there. That's not coming from some left-wing radical lunatic, that's coming from the law firms that are poised to file those cases.
We not only need to make sure that we never sign on to another ISDS clause, we have to double back and make sure that we're protected under the ones that we've already signed on to.
There's an assumption so far this morning that trade deals are pretty good things and they're automatically good, and they're good because we say they're good, but I want to ask a question. What do trade deals do?
They weaken democracy for sure, because they're always negotiated in secret and they bind governments and say that there's a bunch of things that governments can no longer do. They increase income inequality. Every study that's ever been done about income inequality includes trade deals as one of the major features of it.
They endanger public services because every trade deal has a ratchet clause that you can privatize but once you've privatized you can't move backwards to bring it back into the public sector.
Whether we can develop new public services after signing onto CETA and the new improved Trans-Pacific Partnership is an open question.
They give corporations more rights to challenge governments than citizens of the country have.
They endanger our environment and they kill jobs.
Do they increase trade? If we have all those negative effects, is there anything positive that we can say?
Several studies have indicated that trade increases with countries that we don't have great deals with just as much as it does with countries we do. There's no empirical evidence anywhere that trade deals actually improve trade. There is a lot of evidence that trade increases with or without a trade deal. Sometimes we get more increases where we don't have a deal.
What's the evidence that a trade deal is good for the economy? We lived under NAFTA for however many years—far too long. Thousands of manufacturing jobs left. Hundreds of Canadian factories closed. Wages stagnated. Is that the good part?
There are a lot of ways in which NAFTA was a dangerous mistake for the Canadian economy. In what way was it a good deal? Where's the empirical study that says we got some benefits from signing on to the original NAFTA?
The Canada-U.S. one—or the United States Marine Corps one, as Trump would call it—is too new to have the empirical evidence. We went into it assuming that we absolutely needed to protect an agreement that had never been proven to be all that valid in the first place.
CETA has been studied. It hasn't been studied...well, remember when we were being told what a great deal CETA was? There were going to be thousands and thousands of jobs created and a gazillion increases in the gross domestic product. Mr. Trump would have been proud of the way that CETA was sold in the first place. They were specious claims that had no validity at all.
There have been real studies of what CETA is going to do. A UN researcher and a Delft University economist report that CETA will eliminate 227,000 jobs by 2023. A lot of those jobs are going to be in Canada, unfortunately. Several thousand of them are going to be Canadian jobs. They predict that as a result, CETA will drive down wages again even though wages have stagnated for so many years.
Competitive pressures will cause unemployment, inequality and welfare losses. They basically say that this factor has to be part of the informed assessment of any trade deal.
There might be one or two things I've said so far that may be slightly provocative. That's a possibility, so I want to make sure I leave time for people to throw darts at me.
Let me just say that I completely agree with Hassan's description of what needs to be in trade deals. We can't have any more ISDS. If we're going to be part of a trade deal, we have to have an obligation to fight climate change, not just to live up to a country's own rules. It can't be just be paying lip service to climate change. If we're going to make a trade deal that's going to make climate change worse by increasing trade, then at least we've got to factor in some compensating measures that countries have to take to bring climate change under control.
What about enforceable labour rights? I sat through so many meetings where we were told that CETA had the best labour rights that any agreement had ever had, which was true except for the little detail that they weren't enforceable. That's just not acceptable any longer.
We need to respect gender and indigenous rights. We need to make sure that regulatory co-operation doesn't mean making sure that we go down to the lowest common denominator, but that we go up to the highest common denominator.
We have to exempt public services from any trade deal going forward, including with the U.K. There should be no reason for public services in the U.K. or in Canada to be on the block as a result of a new trade deal.
Those are some of the things that need to be in it. Could we possibly reiterate—for the umpteenth time—that trade deals negotiated in secret are not a good idea? The whole process needs to be public, so that the public can tell what's being done in their name.
Thank you for your time.