Mr. Speaker, New Democrats are opposing the Canada-Panama free trade agreement, Bill C-46.
I am going to address a couple of issues. I want to talk about the labour aspect of this legislation and, if I get to it, fair trade and the tax haven.
Earlier, we heard one of the Liberal members talk about the fact that the Conservative government would have consulted and yet, I find that a surprising statement given the fact when Dr. Teresa Healy, the senior researcher for the Canadian Labour Congress, came before the committee, she clearly outlined some concerns around the labour aspects of the bill.
I will not read her testimony into the record, but she did say the Canada-Panama agreement does not include specific protection for the right to organize and right to strike. On labour issues, fines are small, there are no countervailing duties. There is no provision for abrogation or any other such remedy. Yet, again, labour provisions remain in a side agreement rather than in the body of the text.
She indicated a bit of the socio-economic status in Panama. She said 40% of the population is poor, 27% is extremely poor, and the rate of extreme poverty is particularly acute in indigenous populations.
She also pointed out the track record of the Panamanian government.
The president announced unilateral changes to labour law in the summer of 2010. The law ended environmental impact studies on projects deemed to be of social interest. It banned mandatory dues collections from workers. It allowed employers to fire striking workers and replace them with strikebreakers. It criminalized street blockades and protected police from prosecution.
This is hardly a country's labour record that we would want Canada to enter into an agreement with.
The member for Burnaby—New Westminster has been taking the lead on this particular piece of legislation for New Democrats and has proposed amendments to attempt to change some of the more egregious aspects of this agreement.
One of the amendments he put forward was that the trade union workers in Panama be offered the right to collective bargaining as well as requiring the Minister of International Trade, as a principal representative of Canada on the joint Panama-Canada commission, consult on a regular basis with representatives of Canadian labour and trade unions. Sadly, that amendment was defeated at the committee.
I want to put this into context. In an article from October 2010 called “Back to the 'Good' Old Days”, although it is talking about Asia, there makes some good points. It states:
“Child labour rampant in Asia, serfdom on the rise here”.
I am going to quote extensively from the article because it is important when we see the erosion of labour rights in other countries it cannot help but raise concerns at home.
The article starts with a quote from John D. Rockefeller, from 1894. It states:
The disparity in income between the rich and the poor is merely the survival of the fittest. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.
Many of us do not believe that. We believe there are roles for government in terms of redistribution of income.
Quoting again from the article, it states:
During the first 70 years that followed this pronouncement by one of the 19th-century's leading robber barons, the worst excesses of unfettered free enterprise were curbed by government regulations, minimum wage increases, and the growth of the labour movement. Strong unions and relatively progressive governments combined to have wealth distributed less inequitably. Social safety nets were woven to help those in need.
Corporate owners, executives, and major shareholders resisted all these moderate reforms. Their operations had to be forcibly humanized. They always resented having even a small part of their profits diverted into wages and taxes, but until the mid-1970s and '80s they couldn't prevent it. Now they can.
Thanks to the international trade agreements and the global mobility of capital, they can overcome all political and labour constraints. They are free once more, as they were in the 1800s, to maximize profits and exploit workers, to control or coerce national governments, to re-establish the survival of the fittest as the social norm.
This global resurgence of corporate power threatens to wipe out a century of social progress. We are in danger of reverting to the kind of mass poverty and deprivation that marked the Victorian era. Indeed, this kind of corporate-imposed barbarism and inequality is already rampant in many developing countries.
From the statistics that that Dr. Healy quoted, when we have 27% of a country extremely poor and 40% of the population poor, we have to wonder why we would be entering into that kind of trade agreement.
The article went on to talk about how, unfortunately, most Canadians do not seem to know how badly their forebears were mistreated in the workplace of the 1800s. These are labour conditions in Canada, but Canadians often do not realize that in Canada we had some of the worst labour laws going. It talks about a number of things. It says:
Conditions in the mines were especially bad, with most of the miners dying from accidents or “black-lung” disease before they reached the age of 35.
Hundreds of thousands of children, some as young as six, were forced to work 12 hours a day, often being whipped or beaten. A Canadian Royal Commission on Child Labour in the late 1800s reported that “the employment of children is extensive and on the increase. Boys under 12 work all night in glass-works in Montreal. In the coal mines of Nova Scotia, it is common for 10-year-old boys to work a 60-hour week down in the pits”.
This Royal Commission found that not only were children fined for tardiness and breakages, but also that in many factories they were beaten with birch rods. Many thousands of them lost fingers, hands, even entire limbs, when caught in unguarded gears or pulleys. Many hundreds were killed. Their average life expectancy was 33.
As late as 1910 in Canada, more than 300,000 children under 12 were still being subjected to these brutal working conditions. It wasn't until the 1920s, in fact, that child labour in this country was completely stamped out.
In the 1920s in Canada we agreed that child labour was not a norm, finally, that we would agree to. Yet we are saying it is okay to sign trade agreements with other countries where child labour is in fact part of what happens in those countries.
The article went on:
In the United States, another robber baron, Frederick Townsend Martin, was even more candid. In an interview he gave to a visiting British journalist, he boasted: “We are the rich. We own this country. And we intend to keep it by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our purchased politicians, our public-speaking demagogues, into the fight against any legislation, any political party or platform or campaign that threatens our vested interests.”
It is nice to hear that someone was on the record in an honest way about what that particular corporate agenda was.
A modern descendant of John D. Rockefeller, his great-grandson banker David Rockefeller, put it plainly in a speech he gave back in the 1990s: “We who run the transnational corporations are now in the driver's seat of the global economic engine. We are setting government policies instead of watching from the sidelines”.
The article also states:
Already, in most of the developing nations, they have brought back child labour. Conditions in most factories operated by or for the transnational corporations in Asia and parts of Latin America are not much better today than they were in North America and Europe in the 1800s. Thousands of boys and girls are being compelled to work 12 hours a day in dirty, unsafe workshops for 40 or 50 cents an hour.
The article gives a number of examples in some Latin American countries.
When we talk about entering free trade agreements I hear Liberal and Conservative members ask when would the New Democrats ever support a free trade agreement. We would support a free trade agreement when it is a fair trade agreement, when it looks at the working conditions, when it looks at who is being exploited in those countries, when it looks at the corporate agenda in terms of driving the wages down in those unsafe working conditions.
A very good reason for us to question whether or not we should be entering a free trade agreement is when we have a side agreement, as in this particular case, about labour. It is not even integrated into the agreement.
I now have only a brief moment to talk about fair trade.
My colleague from Hamilton East—Stoney Creek earlier talked about multilateral trade. Many of us believe that multilateral trade is a very important way to look at it. Also, when we talk about trade, it should include fair trade.
When we talk about fair trade it is about the fact that workers in the countries of origin have fair access to the profits of their labour. There are a number of principles around fair trade.
To wrap up, I would encourage all members in this House to vote down this agreement. There are better ways that Canada can gauge and demonstrate leadership with countries around trade.