Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today on the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. I want to compliment my colleague, the critic, who has done a very good job of dealing with a very difficult situation and trying to balance our deep concerns for the human rights situation taking place in Colombia with our need to understand and support our free trade initiatives that remove the barrier to trade that we know is going to liberate people, particularly the poorest in the world, from the poverty trap.
We recognize that while aid is a useful primer, foreign direct investment enables countries to have active, vigorous private sectors, where jobs and wealth can be created and moneys can be utilized by responsible governments for the social needs of a citizenry. It is something we support and, hence, that we pursue and support with some provisions.
As has been mentioned before, our goal is to ensure there is improved access. We want to balance it and ensure that elements within this bill are going to be supportive of the social concerns that many Canadians have due to what they have seen in Colombia.
I draw to the attention of the House to two parts. The critic has done a very good job of trying to highlight the parts that we want to ensure were going to be included. The side agreements involve labour co-operation and the environment.
I know that our colleagues and friends in the NDP have spoken about this, but it is very important for us and Canadians to understand that there are two side agreements and they involve the following. The first is the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, the absolute importance to abolish child labour, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, and the elimination of discrimination.
We are also supportive of a $15 million annual budget to ensure this agreement is going to be honoured and not violated. There are, however, some concerns.
There is one point I always try to bring forward. I had the privilege of travelling to Colombia some years ago. We know that the ELN, the FARC and the paramilitary are really driven financially by the moneys they are able to accrue from drugs, primarily cocaine and, to a lesser extent, heroin. There are, in effect, all groups of narco-terrorists. They may have started at one time, particularly the FARC, as having some political constituency and pursuing a certain political ideology, but for a long time that has not been the case.
Mr. “Sureshot” Marulanda died a couple of years ago. We saw the devolution of that individual from becoming a political revolutionary into a pure blooded narco-terrorist. It has been instructive to see how these larger groups are now operating.
In fact, what is happening now in the large context, which the government needs to be aware of and has not brought forward, is the input and responsibility of Venezuela, which is now harbouring the FARC and has for a long time been supporting it and other paramilitary groups to the detriment of the people of Colombia and the region. Frankly, we do not do a good enough job of holding to account the individuals in groups, like the government in Venezuela, to account for their destabilizing activities, in this case in South America.
President Chavez is engaged in activities that some in his country see as being supportive. In the larger context of stability within South America, he is a destabilizing factor. I do not know how anybody can countenance the fact that Mr. Chavez is selling the most vile of all weapons, landmines, to the FARC, that are being used now, despite the fact that Colombia is a signatory to the landmines treaty, the Ottawa process that was started by the Liberal Party.
Despite the fact that Colombia is part of invasive, destructive elements such as what Mr. Chavez is doing, it is killing people. Half the casualties are soldiers; half, however, are civilians.
I was in a different party at the time we were pursuing and pushing hard for the landmines treaty. Part of it was the fact that the majority of casualties were actually civilians. In fact, landmines are the poison that prevents a country from being able to be financially stable.
Imagine if there were one landmine in downtown Ottawa. What would that do for the commerce in Ottawa? It would shut it down cold. Therefore, imagine a country that has thousands of these landmines. The people live in fear because at any moment they could be blown up. It kills the economy. It kills the social infrastructure of a country. The foreign affairs minister and the Conservative government need to do a much better job in that area to deal with the external influences of what takes place to destabilize Colombia.
The other point is there would not be a FARC if there were not a demand for illegal drugs. The government unfortunately takes a position on substance abuse and harm reduction as something to be discarded or discounted. We can see the troubles we have had in the ideological oppression and position that the government has taken against scientifically proven harm reduction strategies, such as Vancouver's Insite or the North American opiate medication initiative, headed by Dr. Julio Montaner at St. Paul's Hospital.
Those things work. Why in heaven's name does the government not get its own House in order and work with the provinces to help reduce the demand of drugs, which are fuelling the internal problems taking place in countries such as Colombia and the Middle East? They are in fact fuelling, in part, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which are killing our soldiers in Afghanistan.
The need and the desire to have effective, scientifically-proven harm reduction strategies is critically important in the larger context. It is also very relevant to the situation we are talking about today. The harm reduction strategies that my colleagues in the Liberal Party have championed and allowed to occur today must continue. The government must work with those who are experts in the area of harm reduction to ensure that Canadians from coast to coast will have access to those initiatives that work.
The bill also has another very important part and it deals with the issue of the environment. We know that in South America, one of the two great lungs of our planet are in Amazonia. We know Amazonia is being destroyed. We also know that addressing deforestation is one of the simplest and easiest ways of addressing and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, particularly for developing countries.
Dr. Eric Chivian and Dr. Ari Bernstein of the Harvard School of Public Health and Dr. Michael Fay, a National Geographic scientist in residence in Washington, have put forth some very compelling solutions as to how we can look at areas that are critically important for the collective health, not only those countries but the world, and use those areas so they will be seen as assets.
Right now we look at forests as an asset when the trees are cut down, but in reality forests are public utilities. They take carbon dioxide from the environment and put oxygen back. That has a value. If we put value on carbon, we can put value on these wild spaces and a country can receive moneys for preserving those carbon sinks. It very important that there are ways of doing this.
I encourage the government to also construct an independent group to oversee this bill. The Liberal Party is very concerned with how the bill will be implemented. This is why we are supportive of the existing oversight mechanism. However, I also suggest there is a very important role and opportunity to bring in civil society in Colombia and Canada, to bring forth a group of independent experts, arm's-length from the government, who can oversee the implementation of the bill to ensure the labour, human, environmental and social benefits of it will be accrued to the people of Colombia.