Mr. Chair, I have a couple of questions for my hon. colleague.
First, I wonder if he is familiar with a document entitled “Municipal Procurement Implications of the Proposed Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union”. This is a legal opinion prepared by Steven Shrybman of Sack Goldblatt Mitchell LLP for the Centre for Civic Governance at Columbia Institute. If he is familiar with it, does he have any comments; and if he is not, would he be willing to receive a copy? I have an extra copy here that I could give him.
Secondly, in previous free trade agreements, NAFTA and the FTA, municipal procurement was really not on the table when it came to subnational governments. We first saw this with the Canada-U.S. procurement agreement that was signed last year. We found out that municipal procurement was on the table and that somehow we were at the short end of this, because we were dealing with the powerful United States.
The EU has made a specific request for full access to public procurement in cities across Canada, including the right of European multinational corporations to bid on core municipal services.
As a representative who has folks living in Humboldt, where the hon. member comes from, I wonder how the folks in Humboldt would feel if a new rec centre was going to be built or new additions made to the arena and they wanted to provide local jobs, yet they were not able to do that because a big multinational came in and outbid them. What would be his reaction to that?