Mr. Speaker, for your information I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Vancouver Island North.
The Reform Party is very proud to have brought this to the floor of the House of Commons in the absence of information being provided by the Liberals over this very, very important issue. The questions of the people of Canada have fundamentally been met by silence.
I heard the member for Winnipeg speaking about the fact that members of Parliament had been briefed. Is that not wonderful. There are 300 of us. There are 30 million Canadians who would like the information, not just 300 members of Parliament.
During the 1997 election the question came up, what is the MAI? What is it all about? There was a lot of concerned chagrin on the part of many Canadians, myself included, because I did not know what the MAI was. All I found out was that it had been under a process of negotiation not just for weeks, not just for months, but for well over a year and the people of Canada had been basically kept in the dark. This has led to a deep concern on the part of Canadians as to what this government, indeed what these multinational companies are up to. What is going on behind closed doors?
Into that vacuum of information we have had the foes of the MAI jump. They have jumped in with books. They have jumped in with public appearances on radio and television. They have been in front of every microphone, and where has the minister been? I do not know. Certainly not in front of a microphone, certainly not explaining this.
I ask the question, what is in it for the foes, what is their agenda? I suppose to a certain extent a person could say it makes an awful lot of money for public interest groups. They take a contrary position to the government and they build it up in some kind of a ghost and goblin way, such as the Council of Canadians has done. It makes a lot of money for their cause and keeps their people employed. Their attack on this is sometimes blunt and forceful and sometimes subtle.
I have in hand a book entitled MAI: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment and the Threat to Canadian Sovereignty . If that is not ghosts and goblins, I do not know what is.
To show the subtleness I am referring to, I quote from page 67: “While it is doubtful whether foreign based corporations would try and use the MAI rules to strike down provincial labour codes directly, the new investment treaty would most certainly create a more competitive climate, which would put additional pressure on governments to weaken parts of the labour codes”. Then they give some examples, and they conclude by saying: “These examples show that this kind of economic type legislation is increasingly the target of attack by big business in this country”.
What is going on here is the foes to the MAI are basically having a field day while fundamentally we have silence from the government on the other side. It is into this breach that the Reform Party jumps, and we jump with information.
The multilateral agreement on investment is going to be a creation of negotiation. It is not a stationary object we can throw stones at. It is presently under negotiation. I suggest, as a matter of fact I state, that a multilateral agreement on investment would be of great benefit to Canada as a trading nation and to all the people of Canada who work for the companies that are involved in producing the goods and services.
What is the MAI? Quite simply it is nothing more and nothing less than a common set of rules that defines the rights and obligations of investors from 29 countries when they invest in any of the other 28 countries that are currently negotiating the agreement. That is it. That is what the MAI is.
The MAI fundamentally sets out a level playing field. It replaces a mixture, a pot-pourri of overlapping and sometimes conflicting investment agreements between all of those countries and other countries in the world. It brings some order to the chaos that presently exists between countries in terms of rules which subject companies to the rules of governments when they make investment in foreign countries.
I also point out that we now have the free trade agreement, NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which is now conducted under the World Trade Organization. All of those agreements have sections relating to investment. We have chaos at this particular point.
What would happen if we did not sign? In committee just the other day, Mr. Jack Stoddart, the chairman and publisher of General Publishing Company, said “It is important because we can live within the OECD”—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—“without the MAI and that is important because many people feel that it is either all or nothing. You have to be in or we will be sort of out in left field. We have so many trade deals, so many trade treaties already with countries we are talking about in the 29 countries but, as Mike Harris the skip of the Canadian men's curling team said `Well, tomorrow the sun will rise”.
Mr. Stoddart then says “Well, if we don't sign this deal the sun will rise. I would suggest however that it is going to be a difficult day for the cultural industry if the deal goes through the wrong way”.
What are we saying here? There are very large Canadian multinational corporations that have investments worldwide. Just to name a few: Cominco, Noranda, Inco, General Motors. They all have investments worldwide. If those investments are put into jeopardy by a foreign country determining that they are going to be treating the Canadian investment in their country in a different way to the way in which they are treating their other national companies, that effectively means the jobs of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Canadians presently working in Canada have the potential of being in jeopardy because of the actions of a foreign nation against a Canadian multinational company.
I just heard a Liberal across the floor say we will not sign a deal unless we get a broad cultural exemption. Was she saying that the jobs and investments in the cultural industry in Canada are more important than the jobs and the investment in the large companies in Canada that have investments outside of our country? Is she pitting one group of workers or one group of investors against another saying that if the mythical cultural group is not protected, then we are not going to protect anyone? That is a rather shameful way to look at it.
We have the globalization of culture whether we want it or not. I heard in committee people from Quebec and people interested in the French language in Canada saying that there is an encroachment on the Internet and the worldwide web of English and English terms are getting in the way of French and thereby undermining the French culture in Canada. This is not unique to Quebec. It is not unique to French speaking Canadians anywhere in Canada. This is exactly the complaint that is addressed in Russia. Russia is using an English word for floppy disk. There is nothing like that in its lexicon.
The difficulty is that if we go to a broad exception such as has been proposed by the Liberals, the U.S. will not sign it. Therefore the MAI will not come into effect. If we go to a broad exception, we have not really achieved anything in any event because we have not been able to define what is culture and what is not culture. Consequently, we will end up with the same chaos we presently have.
The MAI will not make or break Canadian culture. The MAI is a part of our arrangement relative to Canadian culture. The position of the Reform Party is that it would support exceptions as narrow as required and only when necessary for specific protection. This idea of a broad exception, an all encompassing exception, is not acceptable.
We believe that culture should be negotiated at the World Trade Organization as a package of culture. We must negotiate in concert with Germany, France, the U.K. and Australia against the United States to form an alliance against the United States because of its attitude toward the export of its culture.
The MAI, properly negotiated, will be a powerful tool in the hands of Canadian companies and Canadian workers will move ahead as a result of it.