Mr. Chair, I am a little saddened to rise on this debate, though I know this is the first of what will be a debate that may last a year or two in our Parliament and in the European parliament as the negotiations go on.
I will talk about what the debate is not about and then I will talk about what is on the table. Thankfully, at each stage in the negotiating rounds, leaked documents have indicated exactly what will be debated and discussed at the negotiating table.
This is clearly not about any sort of functional trade policy. My colleague in the Liberal Party a little earlier said this was about trade and that the Liberals supported trade. All parties in the House support trade. Unfortunately, the Liberals have had a tendency to support a profoundly dysfunctional trade policy on behalf of the government.
Every time the Conservatives have done something that has been bad for the country, like the softwood lumber sellout that cost tens of thousands of jobs, ministers have risen in the House and said that this would give us billions of dollars in economic spinoff. Yet Canadians from coast to coast to coast have seen the results of the softwood lumber sellout, the cost of tens of thousands of jobs, particularly in my province of British Columbia and in my community. With the shipbuilding sellout, we have seen the loss of a key strategic industry that is protected by every other major industrialized economy, but not by the Canadian government. We have seen blatantly bad and dysfunctional trade policy at every step.
What does this mean? Again, when we talk about this agreement, it is not about improving family income, which has been sorely battered over the last 20 years. Through these agreements, family incomes have gone down in most cases. Middle income Canadians are earning much less than they were 20 years ago. Lower middle income Canadians are earning much less. The poorest Canadians are earning far less. This started under the Liberal government and it continues under the Conservatives.
Even Maclean's, which is certainly not a left-wing publication, said very clearly in its latest issue, “Generation Screwed. Lower incomes. Worse jobs. Higher taxes. Bleaker futures. What boomers are leaving their children”. That is what we have seen from the government. Conservatives have sold out our manufacturing industries, 500,000 lost manufacturing jobs over the last few years as they have sold out various sectors. We talked about supply management, which has been the only stable agricultural sector over the last few years. They put it on the table. When we see what the government has done, we have farmers pleading to get back to 1994 levels in agricultural research funding from the government. Farmers are pleading for a modicum of some of the product promotion supports that our major competitors get. As an example, Meat & Livestock Australia has a budget in excess of $100 million. What does Canada have? Just a few million dollars. It is clearly a dysfunctional trade policy.
What has been the result? We have seen the bilaterals. In every case we have signed these bilateral trade agreements, our exports to those markets go down in real terms. The minister will say that he will throw out apples to oranges and pretend there is no devaluation of our dollar over time. In other words, let us use the dollar of today and then we can pretend exports have increased. I was unable to get this information from the department, because it does not compare apples to apples, so I had to get this from the Library of Parliament. One example is the trade agreement with Costa Rica. Before signature, we were exporting $77 million worth of goods. Now, almost 10 years later, we are exporting $73 million. It has gone down $4 million in real terms. This is happening in case after case.
Therefore, it is not about jobs and it is not about exports. We have a cheerleading government that loves to sign these agreements no matter what the cost. It throws things on the table and ends up always being bested. With the EFTA agreement, Liechtenstein out negotiated us. When we look at every one of these agreements, the Conservative government is about the worst negotiator we have ever seen. That is why most Canadians are earning less. That is why our exports have gone down in markets after we have signed them. However, it not about trade and it is not about agricultural policy.
What is on the table? What is this agreement about?
The only credible study was actually done by the economist Jim Stanford. He indicated a net loss of 150,000 jobs. I just want to read a brief excerpt, because this is important for those who are listening across the country. I have certainly gotten a lot of emails from people who are keenly interested in what is on the table. He referenced a botched model that was thrown out by the minister, one which the minister referenced, as they do with all the trade agreements, as having billions and billions of dollars of net benefits and then of course we see what the results are.
The department never does a post-signing analysis. We never actually even see an impact statement prior to it. It is difficult for Canadians to believe just how dysfunctional the government is on trade policy. It does not do the impact studies before. It does not do the analysis afterward. It does a lot of cheerleading. There is a lot of bluster, but when we look at all the facts that we are putting on the table, that the minister was not able to put on the table, we see a sorely lacking policy.
The comments are:
Only thanks to the idealized assumptions built into the model [... ] could Canada hope to “snatch victory from defeat”: attaining aggregate economic gains despite such a marked deterioration in bilateral trade performance. The real-world experience of other free trade agreements implemented by Canada does not support the hope that a free trade agreement with the EU is the way to make that unbalanced relationship more beneficial for Canada.
We are not talking about the fantasy world of the Conservative Party. We are talking about the real world.
What is on the table? We have heard about supply management and certain of my colleagues have raised this issue. We have and will be talking about food sovereignty. My colleague from the B.C. Southern Interior will be referencing that a bit later in the debate. We have talked about the loss of jobs, about 150,000 net lost jobs. Let us talk about some of the other components within this agreement.
What has been tabled by the government, what is in the leaked documents, shows very clearly that we are looking at substantially enhanced patent protections for the extremely profitable pharmaceutical companies in Canada. We are looking at increases to our provincial drug plans, and to Canadians who depend upon those drugs to maintain their good health and often to survive, of up to 30%. I asked the minister just a few moments ago to respond to that. He had either no idea or wanted to hide those figures. He did not address the issue at all.
What else? We have the egregious investor-state provisions, and that is why Canada has one of the worst trade templates in the world. Investor-state provisions allow for an override of companies. Wherever they are, they can set up a mailbox, as we saw with AbitibiBowater, with Canadians taxpayers coughing up $130 million in that case.
This is a Canadian company using NAFTA rules, these investor-state provisions, a hot button for corporate compensation, for anything they want. It does not go through the court system. It is done in a secret backroom and it is the Canadian taxpayer who pays the tab. In the case of AbitibiBowater, it is $130 million, a Canadian company suing the Canadian government, but doing it by pretending, through a mailbox down in Delaware, that it was a company from somewhere else. It is open season.
I can say that from conversations I have had with European parliamentarians a few weeks ago, who fortunately will have the right to ratify or not to ratify this agreement, they are waking up to investor-state provisions and are extremely concerned.
There is the loss of public procurement. The government has done no study on the job losses that would result from that, but the Union of B.C. Municipalities and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities have all expressed concerns about this, and this investor-state override also has impacts on the environment and environmental protection.
What this means is that the corporate sector can say, “We do not like those environmental regulations. Either stop those environmental regulations or give us massive amounts of compensation”. In a secret backroom, they negotiated away from the public interest. It affects democratic rights. It affects our public services, our public health care, of course, which I mentioned earlier, and it is an increase in costs to all Canadians.
This agreement surely is not free, and the government has to come clean with what the impacts will be for ordinary Canadians.