Mr. Speaker, I rise to pursue a question that I asked of the government a couple of weeks ago. It was actually answered by the Prime Minister.
It had to do with the testimony in committee of someone representing the tobacco industry who threatened to use the North American free trade agreement and the protection of trademark and the property rights entrenched therein to get in the way of the government's apparent intention to bring in plain packaging of cigarettes as a way of discouraging the use of tobacco and I presume particularly by way of discouraging young people who may be attracted by elegant and attractive packaging, although presumably this is something that not just young people are vulnerable to.
I say apparent intention of the government because I am not absolutely sure that the government and the Minister of Health are really intent on doing this. I hope they are because I think it is a worthwhile experiment and I hope that they will not be intimidated by these kinds of threats.
When the Prime Minister answered my question he said he had a different view of the free trade agreement. We have seen a few times when the Prime Minister thinks that if he has a different view of the free trade agreement this is enough. The fact is that the free trade agreement has a text that can be adjudicated in a dispute settlement process and in a variety of other ways. It may not matter what the Prime Minister's view is if it is the view of certain multinational corporations that regard what the government plans to do as objectionable.
If they take the view that the agreement prohibits this, they have a great deal of ability to enforce that. It would not be out of sync with what the agreement actually seeks to do, as I understand it, and that is to limit the power of government to get in the way of transnational business.
This is not the sort of idea that comes out of left field, so to speak. This is the purpose of these agreements, to limit the power of democratically elected governments to get in the way of the profit strategies of transnational corporations.
We have seen other elements of this where the same kind of property right has been entrenched in these free trade agreements or in the GATT or even more shamefully in this House before these agreements were even signed. I am thinking now of the legislation which in two different stages brought about the abandonment of the generic drug legislation that we had in this country. Again, it was one of the ways in which this new free trading regime we have as a result of the FTA and NAFTA and now as a result of the GATT has given new freedom to the corporate agenda.
I hope the government will go ahead with this experiment and not draw back. If it draws back we will never know whether the threat that was made that day, even though it was publicly sloughed off by the Prime Minister, is in fact the real reason. I would certainly encourage the government to test the agreement on this and in other ways.