Mr. Speaker, earlier I asked the Minister of Foreign Affairs if, in the spirit of the Beijing conference on women, he would assure that funding for the women's group going to APEC this week in Vancouver would be there, as I had had calls from my constituents who are members of women's groups and who were not getting any funding to go.
The minister said that funding had been there and it was up to the groups to decide what to do with it.
As it turns out, APEC has been funded by the government for $46 million, a total of $57 million, $46 million by Canadian citizens to APEC, $9 million as business write-offs, and the association of citizens groups that had put together the people's summit has received $200,000. Barely three weeks before the summit was to begin it had only received $100,000 and that has forced the indigenous peoples to pull out of the people's summit which is running parallel to the APEC conference.
These citizens groups represent human rights groups, women's organizations, environment workers, migrant workers and anti-poverty groups.
APEC represents 18 countries. It is an association of economies and its goal is to pursue unfettered trade, unfettered meaning it does not have to deal with human rights or workers rights or the fact there may be child labour or forced labour. The people's summit was an attempt to bring a balance to this process. These countries are home to 2.2 billion people, which is 40% of our globe's humanity.
In 1993 the world conference on human rights in Vienna restated that all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and inter-related. APEC's agenda is to separate trade as having nothing to do with human rights or workers rights, the very people who produce the money for transnational corporations and large economies. They do have rights.
That is not the way APEC sees it. APEC curtails democracy through informal understandings. Democratic countries align themselves with the most repressive and corrupt regimes in the world while at the same time shutting out the voices of the civil society.
There is also the argument that better trade will increase human rights. However, when trade agreements changed in China in 1988 and 1989 we saw the Tiananmen massacre. In Indonesia there continue to be vile human rights abuses, yet in the name of trade we will meet with these people and everything will be fine as long as it is in the name of the dollar.
The countries of APEC and the corporations of APEC, some elected, some unelected, refuse to discuss their impact on human rights, on working conditions, the freedom to associate, the freedom to negotiate, child labour, forced labour, environmental standards, immigration, migrant labour and their affect on indigenous peoples. Again I will state that the indigenous group had to pull out because there was no funding for it.
It is easy to shut out the voices of civil society because they are not funded equally by any standards; $57 million to APEC, $200,000 to the people's summit. They were not allowed to participate. There was no money for transportation. Even transferring the cost of one business reception would likely have covered every expense needed for the people's summit. It would have allowed them to fully participate.