Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak on Bill C-20, the free trade agreement with Honduras.
Despite what members of the government, and perhaps members of their partners, the Liberals, have suggested, we are not opposed to trade. On this side of the House, we are very much in favour of trade, and very much in favour of fairer trade, and where that is possible, then free trade as it goes with fairer trade. However, this is certainly not an agreement we can support, mostly because the partner on the other side of this agreement is not one we should be giving any credence to whatsoever.
The government in Honduras is oppressive, and it was originally formed through a military coup. It is a government that has institutions that are not working. It is the murder capital of Central America, perhaps of the world, and most murders are not investigated even by the police, yet the Conservative government has decided that it is a model deal for us to sign. I just cannot stomach how low we have sunk in search of free trade deals.
We know there is a trade deal coming with Europe, but for some reason it is very badly stalled. It was announced in the throne speech of 2011 along with a trade deal with India, but we have not seen either of them yet. We have seen an apparent signing of an agreement in principle, but we do not even know what those principles are because there have been no details.
Here we are debating, as we did with Panama, a deal with a very poor nation that has a terrible governmental and human rights record, and we are debating it under time allocation, of all things. This is now the most important thing on the Conservative government's agenda, and it has to be done now. However, the agreement in principle was reached in August 2011, which is almost three years ago. The actual deal was signed in November 2013, more than six months ago, but now we have five hours to debate it. That is ridiculous, and 68 time allocation motions are not some kind of scheduling convenience, as the Conservatives would have us believe. They are running roughshod over democracy, and we should not be proud of that record.
Both the Conservatives and Liberals are suggesting that the NDP is opposed to trade, which could not be further from the truth. In fact, we relish the thought that we are going to be able to get at more trade with more partners in this world. However, we need to do it in a way that improves the status of those other countries, and not as a reward for countries that have terrible records and terrible governments, which is in fact what is happening here.
We ask questions when it comes to a trade deal.
Is the proposed partner one that respects democracy, human rights, the environment, labour standards, and Canadian values? If some of those things are not all the way to what a Canadian standard would be, are they working to fix it? If the answer to that question is yes, then that is a partner we can see doing business with on the basis of a free trade agreement.
Is the proposed partner's economy of significant or strategic value to Canada? Apparently it may be of strategic value to some mining industries, but it is a very small player in terms of Canada's overall trade, and we do in fact have a trade deficit with this country.
Are the terms satisfactory? Well, the proposed free trade agreement with Honduras fails this test.
Honduras is a country with undemocratic practices, a corrupt government, weak institutions, low standards, insignificant strategic value, and a record of human rights abuses. When I look at the list of what Honduras is, I cannot help but think that some elements of the Conservative government are heading in those directions.
The fact is that we have had 68 time allocation motions to end debate, which are called “guillotine” motions in other countries because that is what they do. They guillotine debate and democracy. It is an indication that the Conservative government has slipped, we believe, in terms of its democratic practices, like Honduras.
The bill the Conservatives brought forward to change the electoral act disenfranchised some Canadians. That is moving backwards as far as democracy is concerned. The allegations of voter suppression are another example of undemocratic practices.
Regarding corruption in government, we have senators being given money by the Prime Minister's chief of staff in order to keep them quiet, or billing practices whereby senators bill the public for travel when it is a partisan event they are going to or bill for homes they are not living in.
All of these things are corrupt practices of a government. Maybe the Conservatives think they want to be like Honduras, and that is why they want to sign an agreement with it.
We have a Prime Minister who surrounds himself with characters who are of questionable repute. We have a government that is giving more and more power to single individuals within that government, taking that power away from institutions or Parliament and putting it in the hands of a minister. For example, there is Bill C-24, which would give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration the power to individually strip a person born in Canada of his or her Canadian citizenship. We do not normally find that concentration of power except in governments that are not democratic, and that is part of what we are seeing here.
We have weakened institutions in Canada. The Chief Electoral Officer had his powers reduced in the recent bill on electoral reform. We have a fight with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. We did not have the government kicking four people off the Supreme Court, but there was a pretty public spat with the Supreme Court that had a chilling effect between the government and the Supreme Court.
We have lower standards in Honduras, lower standards in Canada, but what has the government's record been over the past few years? We have lowered our environmental standards. We have weakened our labour laws. We have taken ourselves in the opposite direction of improving environment and labour laws. We have stripped environmental protection from hundreds of thousands of rivers and lakes in this country. This is moving in the direction of a less environmentally conscious state, and perhaps Conservatives are looking at Honduras and seeing themselves in the mirror.
Other speakers have talked at length about the human rights abuses that have been legion in Honduras. Some of the human rights abuses have been perpetrated by the government and some perpetrated by others, but none of those human rights abuses have met with any kind of punishment, because impunity is the rule in Honduras. People can get away with anything because there are weak police forces and so little in the way of judicial oversight that very little is done.
What do we have here in Canada in terms of human rights abuses? It is a pretty good country, except we have a thousand or more murdered or missing aboriginal women and we have a government that is refusing over and over again to actually conduct even an investigation into those murdered and missing aboriginal women. In any other country, that would be seen as a human rights abuse. We have appalling living conditions and appalling educational conditions for indigenous people in this country. That in itself is a human rights abuse, and the government appears to want to do nothing to improve the situation. We have refugees who come to this country expecting to be treated with dignity and respect, and in some cases they are denied some or all of their medical care. They are expected to report back to their home country even if their home country is an unsafe place for them.
This is the direction this country has moved under the Conservative government, and it is looking strangely as though maybe Honduras is a comfortable partner for the government. I hope not.
In Honduras we also have the spectre of the killing of journalists. Now, I will not accuse the Canadian government of killing any journalists; that has not happened, but the government has attacked the CBC and it has attacked the CBC's journalists in the sense that it has now imposed itself in the collective bargaining arrangements with those journalists. The journalists are now having to deal directly with the government.
We on this side of the House support fairer trade. We support trade with equals in terms of environmental law, in terms of labour law, in terms of how people are treated in those countries. We support trade when standards in that other country will be raised and when we can see that happening. We do not support the free trade agreement the government has negotiated with Honduras for the reasons I have cited, and we will be opposing this deal.