Mr. Speaker, today thousands of demonstrators were tear-gassed and pepper sprayed in Seattle in protest of the millennium round of the WTO and in defence of democracy. Thousands of students, seniors, trade unionists and concerned citizens travelled to Seattle from Vancouver to join the tens of thousands of people there to make it crystal clear to Canadian government representatives, including the Minister for International Trade, that Canada is not for sale.
The mobilization and opposition to globalization is widespread and more and more people are connecting and understanding how threatening the WTO agenda is to our democracy and public services.
If the Liberal government believes it can get away with quietly handing over control of our resources and services to the WTO it is absolutely mistaken. It is shameful that the Canadian government has supported and promoted the very narrow and anti-democratic definition of trade liberalization as envisaged in the WTO.
Whether it is the auto pact that protected Canadian jobs, farm income support or culture, Canada has already suffered from WTO rulings. We are threatened now with challenges to our drug patent laws that will force drug prices to go up even higher than they have been under NAFTA.
What is even scarier is that for the first time the federal government is looking to include health care and education as priorities for export. Any changes in the General Agreement on Trade in Services by reverting to a top down agreement will be devastating to our education and health care and allow them to become commodities for trade and subject to control by foreign corporations.
I cannot believe the Liberals are allowing this to happen. Who is serving whom? Surely the role of our federal government is to serve the public interest, meet the needs of Canadians and protect our valuable resources and services. All the evidence shows us that the Liberal government has gone on a wild binge of serving not ordinary Canadians but the corporate elites and the global market ideology.
Canadians who are at the battle in Seattle today and many more people who could not be there are saying to the government, “Stop the WTO sell out. We are opposed to the global hegemony. We are opposed to corporate rule. We are opposed to Canadian resources and public services being put on the WTO chopping block”.
We need rules that protect our services and rules that make multinational corporations operate within the confines of the public interest. Why will the government not make that its goal? It is what Canadians want.