Mr. Speaker, I will pick up on certain elements of the motion. Members from the NDP caucus will be rising throughout the day to speak to various aspects of the motion before the House.
I will begin with the first element of the motion. It talks about the government having sabotaged Canadian democracy by pursuing a trade policy that gives excessive power to unelected and unaccountable international trade organizations and erodes the ability of Canada's elected representatives to act in the public interest.
As my leader stated earlier, this is not a radical or debatable observation in many respects. The Minister for International Trade himself has talked about the transfer of power from the state to the market. To the extent that Canada is a democratically elected state, it is clearly a transfer from the democratic realm to the realm of the market, and the market as it is designed, created and regulated by the WTO, an organization which I would submit has very much been designed by and for the multinational corporations.
I would submit to some of my colleagues who are to my left in the House of Commons but on my right ideologically that they too should be more concerned about this than they sometimes are.
I attended a conference about a month ago in Edmonton. It was sponsored by a member from Edmonton and the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough. They talked about the erosion of democracy. They were very concerned about the transfer of power from parliament to the prime minister and from parliament to the courts and from parliament to various other places within Canadian society.
What I said at that conference I will say here again today. People who are concerned about the erosion of democracy and the erosion of the power of parliament should also be concerned about the erosion of the power of parliament by virtue of the transfer of the powers of parliament to the marketplace through these various agreements.
This is a debate that has been going on for some time. I recall making speeches not unlike this one in 1987-88 when we were debating the free trade agreement, then NAFTA, then the institution of the WTO and the MAI. Now we have the new round, the so-called millennium round, at the WTO and the FTAA.
All these things are of a piece with a movement away from what the NDP regards as the proper exercise of democracy. Many of the things which traditionally were the object of political debate and parliamentary decision have been taken out of the hands of parliament and placed in the hands of trade bureaucrats or, for that matter, enshrined as policy in various trade agreements. The former things that we were able to debate and decide and on which governments were able to change their minds as we got new governments or as governments themselves changed their minds, are all things that are no longer possible.
Can we actually make a decision here in parliament about drug patent laws? No, we cannot because that is settled by a trade agreement. Can we make laws about having two price wheat or a two price energy system? No, we cannot because that has been settled by the free trade agreement. Can we have split-run magazines? No, we cannot even debate that anymore because that has been decided by the WTO.
Can we have a national ban on the export of bulk water? It appears that we cannot have that. When the Minister of Foreign Affairs was asked just yesterday whether he was going to bring in such a thing, he clearly did not make that commitment. He said that he would bring in something that would have the effect of protecting Canada's water resources, but he did not say that he would bring in a national ban because the government itself knows that the nature of NAFTA is such that water is not exempt in the way it has claimed it is. We are therefore at risk of not being able to prevent the bulk export of water if that is what we want to do.
It is not a question of whether we should or should not in this case as in so many other cases. It is a question of whether we can or cannot because of these particular agreements.
That is the democratic question. That is why we in the NDP want to put this debate about the WTO and about these trade agreements in the context of the ongoing debate about democracy. One of the elements that is so significant in terms of eroding democracy is the chapter eleven investor state dispute mechanism.
I want to spend what little time I have left on that particular mechanism. Here we see an ability on the part of foreign corporations, not domestic corporations or Canadian corporations that have to live within the law and whose only recourse is through the domestic courts, but foreign corporations, thanks to the chapter eleven mechanism, to have a mechanism at their disposal to harass and to intimidate the Canadian government in a way that would never have been conceivable in an earlier time. It was not even an element of the free trade agreement. It only came in with NAFTA.
We have seen the harassment and intimidation of the government with respect to the issue of MMT, which my leader talked about. We see it now with respect to the whole question of water and the action brought against the Canadian government by Sun Belt as a result of its inability to create a situation in which it can export bulk water from Canada.
Why would any government tolerate a mechanism that would give foreign corporations this kind of ability? All of this is being done, as so much of what has been proposed in the MAI and now is being proposed at the WTO, in the name of creating new opportunities for Canadian companies and Canadian investors abroad.
The member of the Reform Party talked about Canadian companies. I do not take it as a given that whatever is good for any particular Canadian company is good for Canada. I do not subscribe to that old American notion that what is good for GM is good for America or that what is good for any particular Canadian company is good for Canada. What a lot of these companies want is to do business abroad, and there is nothing intrinsically evil about that.
The point is that they should not be asking Canadians to give up their way of life, to give up the way we have organized our life together over the years, in order to create opportunities for them to make money abroad.
What is being asked here is for Canadians to give up the kind of regulations that we have had over the years for foreign investment so that our Canadian investors can invest in other countries without similar kinds of regulation. I do not think that is right. I do not think that we should be asked to give up our ability to regulate foreign investment. We see it coming in this next round.
We will see it in the areas my leader has mentioned in terms of health care and education, because there are Canadian companies that want to market health care expertise abroad. I am not against that, but I am against it if it means that in order for that to be possible we have to dismantle our public health care system, our medicare, and create opportunities for American or other foreign multinational health care corporations to be able to penetrate our public health care system and create more privatization and contracting out and eventually so erode the public dimension of our health care system that we end up with an Americanized or commercial health care system.
That is the agenda. Anybody who does not want to admit that is not levelling with the Canadian people. That is where I hold the Liberal government responsible. It is not willing to admit that this is the agenda of certain people with the WTO. It is not willing to admit that it is not willing to stand up to that agenda. We do not hear it. Perhaps we will hear it later and that would be good news, but I am not holding my breath that the parliamentary secretary will get up in his place and say that the Canadian government is seeking a full, absolute and categorical carve out of public health care and education in this next round. That is not what the government has been saying. It has not been saying that it is opposed to putting services on the table.
This is just one little aspect of what we are concerned about. We are concerned about many other things, such as the fact that in agreement after agreement after agreement it is investors' rights which are protected. It is investors' rights which are in force. Investors, investors, investors. What about workers? What about the environment? What about democracy? What about all the other things that matter to people? Well, that can wait.
We can have lofty statements by the minister about how he would like to humanize globalization. He is going to humanize globalization over the next 50 years, but when it comes to investors they can have their rights this year. For us, that is a perverse moral hierarchy where the powerful get even more rights and the powerless get to wait and we are against it.
I would therefore like to move, seconded by the hon. member for Yukon, that the motion be amended by inserting the word “immediate” between the words “take” and “action”.