Mr. Speaker, I recently participated in a delegation to Chile sponsored by the Canadian Labour Congress.
The CLC and its Chilean counterpart have called on the governments of Canada and Chile to incorporate into any Canada-Chile trade accord a core set of labour and environmental rights that could act as a base for strengthening the now very weak provisions of NAFTA.
Chile's labour laws are still fundamentally those put in place by the right wing dictatorship. If that is all that is required to join NAFTA, then that should tell Canadians a lot about the moral emptiness of such trade agreements.
I also want to raise the concerns of the people of San Alfonso and those who live in a nearby nature sanctuary called Cascada Animas about the gas pipeline being built by the Canadian company Nova Corp. It was embarrassing to hear stories about how this Canadian multinational has behaved. I urge Nova Corp. to heed the concerns of these people and change its plans accordingly.
Between the pipeline and what we heard about Canadian mining companies in northern Chile, I was starting to feel like the Canadian equivalent of the ugly American. Canadian companies should want to do better than this.