Mr. Speaker, today we are addressing Bill C-54, which is an act to amend the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, commonly known as the blocking legislation for the Helms-Burton bill in the United States.
I am pleased to be able to speak at this the third and final reading of Bill C-54. During a previous debate on the bill I was interested to note that members of the other opposition parties felt the way the Reform Party does, that this bill should be supported but that it does not go far enough. I will outline the reasons.
This is only a stop gap measure, a half measure if you like, that needs to be advanced a lot further. I have stated repeatedly that this bill should go further. Canada must act in other ways to get this situation resolved quickly.
It is fine to have legislation on the books to be used if we need to do so. It is there on the shelf, but as the Minister for International Trade stated himself, we hope we never have to use it.
While every well stocked medicine cabinet contains an antidote for accidental poisoning and snake bites, it is hoped they never have to be used but it is pretty nice to have them there if they are needed. It is far better though to eliminate the problem from one's territory and remove the deadly poisons from one's household.
What I am getting at is that the United States must be told that not only is the Helms-Burton bill unwise, it is illegal. Titles III and IV of the Helms-Burton legislation are in clear violation of the NAFTA agreement which the United States has signed. Title III further violates international law and the sovereignty of all countries that invest and trade with Cuba.
Even though it is nice to have an antidote, let us get rid of this poison and this problem once and for all. Canada has been in the position for some time to call a dispute settlement panel under NAFTA. I submit that had we done this when this problem first arose in June, it could have been settled by now. We could have been finished with it and eliminated some of the potential for problems.
We know the President of the United States has given Canada a six months reprieve and may do so again. However, it is election time in the United States and we can never be sure if that is going to happen. In fact, President Clinton, or perhaps it will be President Dole at that stage, may be in a position to extend the six months further or he may not. On the other hand, a new crisis may occur which will force the president to allow lawsuits to go ahead. We do not want our companies to be in that position.
Furthermore, the metre on the claims continue to tick. We are still being exposed to these claims and the liabilities are continuing to accumulate. This bill does nothing to protect certain Canadian executives and their families who may be turned away when trying to enter the United States. That issue continues to be unresolved. We need to have the Helms-Burton bill overturned. We can only do that by challenging the legislation at a NAFTA panel.
There is another reason for getting Helms-Burton overturned. Canadian companies operating in Cuba have to decide whether or not to do business with Cuba. They can follow the U.S. rules. If they do that, they are hit with a fine of $1.5 million Canadian, or they can decide not to follow the U.S. rules and get hit with a fine of $1 million U.S. That is a little like a choice of being hit by either a brick or a baseball bat. Really, it is not much choice at all. The only real solution to this problem is to resolve it once and for all with a decision by a NAFTA panel.
It disturbs me that time and time again this government has allowed itself to be pushed around by the Americans. A persistent pattern has developed in this area. It certainly has.
We can go back to 1994 with soft wheat, the pasta wheats. Canada caved in on a dispute with the United States and accepted export caps. What happened was that the free trade agreement stated that Canada had the right, if we have any economic advantage, to export into the United States just as they had the right to export into our country. The subsidies are equal. That is not what we settled on. We settled on export caps on wheat deliveries to the United States. That deal has now expired and we hear rumblings that they may want to start it again.
We have caved in on the softwood lumber issue. Instead of taking it to a softwood lumber panel under NAFTA or the World Trade Organization, again we have accepted caps on exports. In that case it is even worse because we have to administer this bureaucratic nightmare ourselves.
The lumber industry has been waiting six months to have a process put in place it can comply with. Now it has learned it is going to take at least another month before provincial quota allocations will be decided, never mind the whole problem that we are going to get into with allocating to the different companies once that happens.
I will say again that a persistent pattern has developed and that Canada has been afraid to take on the Americans under these dispute settlement processes that we have worked so hard to put in place.
I would submit that we cannot allow ourselves to be pushed around. Furthermore, there is absolutely no need for it. Our trade agreements give the protection we require here. We have worked very hard to put these processes in place but when it is time to test them we always seem to be afraid and back away.
I also submit that it is very important for us to test these agreements when we feel we can win. How credible can Canada be in further reforms that we want to take place at the World Trade Organization and further dispute settlement mechanisms that we want to put in place when we have not even used the processes that we have negotiated in the last round?
I would like to talk a bit about the country that is being affected in addition to Canada over the Helms-Burton legislation. That little country of course is Cuba. We should take every opportunity to remind the Americans that their dispute is with Cuba and not with Canada. Although we share America's desire to see a more democratic, market driven country in Cuba, we think there are other means to achieve this. We know that the United States has used an isolationist policy and I do not believe that has worked. We have 40 years in which that has taken place and we still have a communist government in Cuba.
I believe that Canada shares some responsibility for the problems there too. We continue to trade and I think we should, but we have other tools that we can use.
We heard the Secretary of State for Latin America a little while ago speaking about the gains that have been made in terms of human rights and economic reforms and what Canada is doing to help. I think that is laudable that we have been helping out where we can, but we have not heard of too many gains that have taken place in trying to make that a more open, democratic country or any result in multi-party open elections, freedom of voting, freedom of expression. Those are all very restricted.
For 40 years we have had a policy of trading with Cuba and what is the result in terms of the other side of this, the engagement part? Very little, it seems, and I think we have to work a lot harder to accomplish an open, democratic country in Cuba. We have to work with the OAS to achieve this. We in the Reform Party believe that engaging Cuba is the right approach. We think there are other methods and I will outline those.
I think trade in this case is our carrot and we can use other methods such as the carrot and stick approach if we like, but we do have to trade with Cuba and use the opportunities to discuss the serious issues where we are not making gains.
We can make aid conditional upon improvements in certain areas like human rights and democratic reform. We can insist that Cuba get no special deals in terms of bilateral aid from Canada, no Canadian partnerships in CIDA for example that go bilaterally, which came to about $500,000 in 1994-95, and that there be no technical support from IDRC, the International Development Research Centre.
We have to see some movement, some improvement in those conditions in the United States before we should offer these kinds of technical supports. We should certainly not have any more dipping into the Canada fund to support activities in Cuba until we see some progress made in the areas I have just identified.
We should continue trading in the private sector but do what we can in terms of engagement to encourage change and restrict Canadian aid programs until some improvement is made.
In conclusion, Reform supports this bill but we do not think it goes nearly far enough. There needs to be a resolution at NAFTA, but it is a stop gap measure and to that extent I think it is probably necessary.
In addition, we must take a more hard nosed attitude when we deal with the United States in these types of disputes. Canada must clearly challenge the United States, which is way out of bounds on this issue. I believe the United States does not respect countries that cave in, and that seems to be our history in the last while. We should challenge the United States when we feel we are clearly in the right, and this is one of those times when we should challenge the United States.