Madam Speaker, my petition today is a call to stop the Canada-Colombia trade deal, a familiar topic in this Parliament.
Violence against workers in Colombia has not abated at all. More than 2,200 trade unionists have been murdered since 1991. There has been a host of violence committed against indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, human rights activists, workers, farmers, labour leaders and journalists.
When the Canada-Colombia trade agreement was negotiated along the lines of NAFTA, its benefits really accrued to the corporations and not the people at large. There has not been any big improvement, certainly under NAFTA anyway, to the labour standards. In the case of Mexico, over a million agriculture jobs have been lost since NAFTA was approved.
The petitioners call upon the Parliament of Canada to reject the Canada-Colombia trade deal until an independent human rights impact assessment is carried out and the resulting concerns addressed, and that the agreement be re-negotiated along the principles of a fair trade, which would fully take into account the environmental and social impacts as well as genuinely respecting and enhancing labour rights and the rights of all affected parties.