Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to pursue a question that I asked in the House last week, punctuated by two events. Tomorrow we experience the 25th anniversary of the devastating assault, the organized crackdown by the People's Republic of China Communist Party. I can remember watching on television as the Statue of Liberty was built in Tiananmen Square. We felt that perhaps the Communist government in China was on the verge of a Chinese version of what we had just seen sweep through the former USSR, glasnost and perestroika. There was a hope that China was on the verge of a breakthrough in democracy. Instead we witnessed one of the most brutal crackdowns and saw innocents slaughtered in Tiananmen Square.
It struck me with some irony that we were five days away, at the time of Tiananmen Square, from a really brave effort for democracy by a Vancouver Island first nation, the Hupacasath First Nation of 300 souls. They are located not far from Port Alberni, and they have chosen to go to the Court of Appeal to oppose a very dangerous—and I use the word “dangerous” advisedly—investment agreement with the People's Republic of China. It is a FIPA, a foreign investment protection agreement, that will give the People's Republic of China rights to challenge Canadian law superior to those rights held by Canadian domestic corporations.
The agreement will apply to the state-owned enterprises of the People's Republic of China, whether they be Sino-Paper or Sinopec or CNOOC or PetroChina or any other, and not just the oil and gas sector. Any investors from the People's Republic of China in Canada represent tentacles of the government in Beijing, with boards of directors appointed by the Communist Party and the Politburo of the People's Republic of China.
This is not merely a statement about the unique characteristics of the People's Republic of China. The Green Party is the only party that actually opposes the concept of investor state agreements. We do so because, for the first time, trade agreements are being used as a way of diminishing democracy. One of the best trade lawyers in Canada, Steve Schreibman, describes these agreements as “fundamentally corrosive of democracy” and says that they give foreign corporations the right to oppose and to seek arbitrations around any decision, whether at the municipal level, the provincial level, or the federal level, that is seen by these corporations as imperilling their expectation of profit.
In that sense, it is particularly egregious to allow an antidemocratic government to challenge the decisions of a democratic government. The Canada-China investment treaty is different in quality from, say, NAFTA's chapter 11 in that its enterprises are completely part and parcel of a much larger economy and a government that itself is antidemocratic.
The other very egregious thing about this agreement is that the lock-in, if it were ever ratified, would apply for 31 years, and no future government could get out of it without the permission of the People's Republic of China.
I ask my hon. colleague if it is not time to agree that this agreement should be scrapped.