Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to debate this bill regarding the free trade agreement between Jordan and Canada, and talk about it from the perspective of a trade deal that is flawed. However, all of us are in agreement to send the bill to committee to make it better.
Why is the agreement here in the first place? Why are we talking about the implementation of it rather than how we develop trade agreements? It seems that we do everything backward. The government goes about negotiating a trade deal without asking for input from this side of the House. It then brings it back and asks us to implement it. Then we get into these debates.
The government seems to be intent on doing bilateral agreements because the vast majority of its latest free trade attempts have been bilateral attempts, not multilateral attempts. That being the case, I would suggest to the government that it make it easy on all of us.
The government should bring it to the House and let us debate the labour aspects, the environmental aspects and the whole trade bill itself. Then the implementation of it should be pretty simple. The bill will be sent to committee. The committee will work on it and fine-tune it. The bill will come back to the House and we will vote for it, because we will have figured out what it is we want, rather than there being a one-sided approach where the government says it wants to do it one way, and we end up in a protracted debate. The government refuses to negotiate trade bills and come to the House and debate them. The government simply goes ahead and does it and says to accept it or not, and that is the end of it. That to me does not seem to be enlightened thinking. It simply causes government members a lot of heartache and slows the process down.
Notwithstanding that, a number of colleagues in the House today have mentioned the amount of trade that actually happens between Jordan and Canada. It does not necessarily have to be a large trade deal to go ahead with it. Does it always need to be of huge benefit to one country over the other? If it is not a big trade deal should we forget about it? That is not the case at all.
In the case of Canada and Jordan, we are looking at trying to establish a trade pattern that should be of mutual benefit to the citizens of the two countries. We should gain something from it and so should the Jordanians. It should not be a predatory process. We know what it is like to be exploited. All we have to do is look at NAFTA, the free trade agreement with the Americas, the free trade agreement with the U.S., and of course the most recent one which the government decided to enter into, the government procurement deal. We know all about being on the receiving end of that predatory bird picking away at us and devouring us, because with those three trade agreements, we have been on the short end of the stick.
When we talk to folks in committee about the latest trade agreements, and the most recent one was bilateral, no one from the department could tell us how much we would get, how much was available to us, whether it was a net benefit to the Canadian worker, whether it was a net benefit to the Canadian economy, none of those things. Yet the government went ahead and signed the agreement anyway when it came to government procurement. It is simply amazing.
I do not think we want to do that to the Jordanians, being the folks who we are who believe that a sense of fair play should rule when it comes to entering into these agreements. Maybe we have decided that we should take advantage of someone else because we have been taken advantage of so many times in the other deals and we have decided to push it. That is not what we want to do on this side of the House. We want a fair deal with the Jordanians and I think the Jordanians want a fair trade deal with us, but we need to help.
Folks have talked about the human rights abuses in other parts of the world when it comes to bilaterals, and the example of Colombia has been used, but that is not the debate today. Clearly, when we look at the human rights practices in Jordan, a number of them require attention. As recent as March of this year there is a report by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor on the abuses that happen in Jordan. It is the right of Jordanians to decide for themselves, but it is our right to say no to the trade deal if we do not agree with what they do internally.
If child labour is something the Jordanians want, then I guess it is not our right to tell them they cannot do it. However, it is our right not to have a free trade deal with them. Child labour actually exists in Jordan. In this country we decided that child labour should be abolished and we did something about it. If we are going to have a free trade deal with the Jordanians, we have to tell them we do not put children to work in this country. We certainly have young people who work in the summer to get work experience and make a few dollars as they head toward university and college, but we do not ask kids under the age of 12 to go to work on a full-time basis. It is against the law in this country.
I think we accept that this is not what we want to see happen around the world either.
It is not this state's right to tell that state what it should do. Again, I emphasize it is in our country's ability to say no to the trade deal.
When we look at the statistics, it ends up being close to, according to the government's numbers, 32,000 child labourers in Jordan. The population of Jordan is only a few million. It is not a hugely populated country.
The law says that it forbids children under the age of 16 years of age, except as apprentices. Last time I checked, apprentices actually were. Reports of child labour are being substantiated, such as children who work in mechanical repair, agriculture, fishing, construction, hotels, restaurants, as well a the informal sectors, street vendors, carpenters, blacksmiths, domestic workers and painters and in small family businesses.
When we look at that, we have to ask ourselves this. Is that something we want to allow and is that something a free trade deal might exacerbate? It is a legitimate question to ask. Or is that something a free trade deal may help put an end to?
We do not know the answers to those questions because we have not asked them yet. We did not put that into the free trade agreement in the labour piece of the agreement, which we took out and put to the side. We do not have a clause in there that says, “thou shall not have child labourers”. Maybe we should have asked that question. Maybe we should have bargained with it. Maybe we need it to go to committee to ensure that we get it and if we do not get it, we say no. That is the decision we will have to make as we send it to committee and work on it. If the end result is that we do not believe we can tell Jordan, as a state, that it should not have child labourers, then I guess we should say no to the free trade deal.
Again, I will quote the statistics. In 2008 the Department of Statistics estimated the number of working children between the ages of 5 to 17 at more than 32,000. Activists in the country said that they believed it to be higher. It is hard to document child labourers. Not too many parents will tell us their child is involved in child labour. Of course if it is illegal, not many companies are going to say they have children working for them. They do not want to get caught, so why would they tell us that?
We need to ask that fundamental question. I think all members in the House agree with me and would be proud to stand in their place and say that they do not believe children should be abused and worked before the age that we would understand is the normal working age. I do not think there is a member in the House who would say they believe in child labour and child exploitation. I know that to be true.
If that is the case, then we ought to say no to this free trade agreement until we are satisfied that the Jordanians are putting a mechanism in place to end it and that can be substantiated.
Let me also talk about labour rates. Labour rates are an important component of trade deals. There are certain industries that the major component of costs is the labour rate. When we look at the national minimum wage, as of January 1, it increased from 110 dinars a month to 150 dinars per month. What does that mean in Canadian wages? It means it went from $156 a month to $213 a month. Ostensibly it went to about $7 a day, give or take, depending upon the month.
If we are in a competitive agreement and suggest that Canadian wages can be competitive at $7 a day when I know in the province of Ontario the minimum wage just went up to $10.25 an hour, I am not quite sure how that works out. I am not sure how we square that circle.
When we look at all these things, we start talking about who is being exploited and are we being complicit in that exploitation. Do trade deals help the exploitation and those who exploit them, or do we, indeed, put an end to it? When I look at the side agreement on labour, I do not see anything in there that talks about how we would get rid of those who exploit and what we would do to end it.
There are nice things about telling Jordan it is not allowed to do certain things, but if it does and it gets caught and convicted, it will get fined. That is of course if it gets through the judiciary properly because the judiciary has some issues, which I will speak to in a minute. How much the fine is no one is really sure because it has not been determined. There is no maximum or minimum, it would just be subject to a fine.
If it happens to be a foreign worker, my guess is that person will be deported rather than fined. When we look at foreign workers, we find they have less rights than those who are born in Jordan. They end up with no rights when it comes to the labour force. What happens is they get deported if they complain. Foreign workers quite often are detained. In fact, the Jordanian government has admitted that what has happened to foreign workers is criminal, it needs to do something about it and it is making other attempts.
We at least need to look at the Jordanian king because the government emanates from him. It truly does because the king chooses the prime minister, the cabinet, he has a say with certain mayors of large cities, he dissolves Parliament and calls Parliament. Even though there is an elected House, its members do not have the ability to dissolve themselves or even ask to be dissolved. In this House—