Not on dairy, poultry and eggs. Dairy, poultry and eggs, I might point out, are three of the major sources of income of many of the farmers across this country.
I also want to talk a little bit about free trade, the concept in general, and this is about the relative labour market. When we allow products to come from one economy into another, it behooves us as parliamentarians to ensure that our businesses and workers are competing on something like a level playing field.
The average wage in Panama is $2 an hour. If people are making goods and setting up businesses in Panama and they want to export products, the archetypical widget, into different countries, where would they set up that business? Would they set it up in Winnipeg, in Saskatoon, in Vancouver, in Toronto or in Kitchener where they might pay $15, $16 or $20 an hour, wages that Canadians need to raise a family, or will they set up that business in Panama where they pay $2 an hour?
I was in the private sector for 16 years working for a union and we dealt with hundreds and hundreds of private sector employers. I listened at bargaining tables many times as those business people explained their businesses. I will tell the House exactly where they will set up their business. They will set up their business in Panama. Something else those businesses would say to me, because they have said it to me many times, is that they cannot compete with businesses that are setting up and paying their workers $2 an hour.
I want to hear someone from the government explain how Canadian businesses, which are expected to pay living wages, workers compensation premiums, employment insurance premiums, private pension contributions and training costs, leaving their wage costs to be probably up around the $20, $30 or $40 an hour mark, sometimes more, will compete with Panamanian businesses if we allow products from Panama to come into our country tariff-free?
That is why New Democrats oppose this deal. It is not because we are opposed to trade. By all means, let us continue trading with Panama, but let us not give up the important social policy tool, the economic lever of putting tariffs at the border on certain goods that are coming in so that we can ensure that our Canadians businesses and our Canadian workers are competing on a level playing field, because that is all they want.
Canadian businesses and workers are some of the best in the world. We do not need preference. We do not need hand-outs. All they ask for and all we ask for is a level playing field or something similar to that.
My colleague in the Liberal Party said that if that were the case, we would never sign a trade deal with anybody because nobody pays those kinds of wages. Actually, many countries in the world do. All of the EU countries do. We should be looking to the many countries in South America that are bringing their standards up. We could also be looking at a phased in reduction of tariffs. As those countries start bringing up their labour standards, their wages and their environmental protection, we can start phasing down our tariffs.
There are many other mechanisms and policy levers that I refer to as “managed trade”. Some of my colleagues have called it “fair trade”. I believe those concepts are prudent, conservative, moderate and they give our economy time to absorb goods and services that come from very different economies. It also acts as an incentive to those other countries to raise those standards.
I want to talk briefly about what this agreement says about the environment. It says that both Canada and Panama would be required by this agreement to not weaken their environmental regulations. I have done a bit of research and the environmental legislation and regulations in Panama are, and I will charitably say, not world-setting. Its environmental standards are weak and all this agreement does is obligate it not to weaken them further. Does it require that country to improve its environmental regulation? No, but it could.
Under a New Democrat proposal, sitting at a trade table, that is exactly what we would do. We would sit down and say that we would talk about giving the country preferential access to our market on a number of conditions, and one of the conditions would be that it work with Canada and we would both commit to improve our environmental standards.
What kind of agreement asserts progress when it just says that we are not going to get any worse? That is not progress. That is the status quo. That is stagnancy.
One of the excuses the Canadian environment minister and the government uses for not implementing the Kyoto accord, or any of these numbers, is that they cannot do it unilaterally if the rest of the world does not do it. The government will not do it if China and India do not do it.
Why then does the government sign a trade agreement with a country that does not obligate that country to raise its environmental standards? One would think that would be the logical trade policy the government would take if in fact its rhetoric about not improving our environmental standards were true.
Coming from a prime minister who said that Kyoto was a socialist plot, I am not sure I believe the government has any real commitment to climate change amelioration, or any real attempt to improve the environment of this world.
I want to conclude by talking a little about Canadian businesses and what trade policy should consist of.
I come from Vancouver where we have a vibrant, healthy business sector with many small businesses that are actively engaged in trading goods and services around the world, primarily in Asia. I talk to these businesses on a weekly basis. They explain to me what their challenges, ideas and dreams are. What they want is managed trade. I do not have any business person coming to my office saying that he or she wants a complete tariff-free agreement with a country.
Tariffs have been around in this world for a long time. The reason they have is because they serve a purpose. Tariffs allow us to use policy levers to encourage good behaviour and punish bad behaviour. To sign an agreement in an organic world, a dynamic world, one would want to maintain those levers.
I encourage the government to utilize those levers for the kinds of issues and policies with which I think all Canadians agree. We want to improve the standard of living for Canadian workers and their families. We want to improve the business opportunities for Canadians, particularly the small and medium business sector so they can compete on the world stage. However, I want them to compete on a fair basis, not on one that is based on untrammelled access to our markets where we have to rely on the good graces of a country that has a poor record on just about every measure we can think of, and that is Panama.
I encourage all members of the House to think seriously about this agreement and to vote in a manner that encourages our workers and businesses to prosper on the world stage.