Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Beauport—Limoilou.
Today we are talking about Bill C-41, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the Republic of Korea. The NDP wants to strengthen trade ties between Canada and the Asia-Pacific region. We recognize that this is vital to Canada's prosperity in the 21st century. That being said, before signing off on anything, the NDP evaluates trade agreements according to important criteria. That is why it has often opposed these deals in the past.
We feel it is important that our potential partners believe in democracy, human rights and labour laws. They should have adequate environmental standards that are in line with Canadian values. These details are very important. If there are problems in these areas, we must ask our partners to take steps to meet those objectives. That is important.
South Korea is a democratic country but was under a dictatorship for a long time. Changes in a country's history do not happen overnight. The 1987 dictatorship did not disappear one day and it was all sunshine the next. It takes time to get used to living with our differences, which is why I am going to talk about a fundamental point.
South Korea was under a dictatorship until 1987, at which time it became a multi-party and dynamic democracy that built a labour movement. That does not mean that everything is going perfectly well, either, but still, wages are good and civil society is beginning to organize.
However, when we sign free trade agreements, we have to be aware of the true labour conditions in the other countries involved in the negotiations. We hope that they are like us in Canada, but that is not the reality. It is something else entirely.
As a matter of principle, the NDP does not want to sign free trade agreements with dictatorships or totalitarian regimes like China. The NDP expects that countries that sign free trade agreements with us uphold human rights and are environmentally aware. Above all, they must respect workers' rights. The NDP wants to negotiate with countries that share these same fundamental rights that are so important to Canadians.
Let us go back to South Korea and all the changes it went through. Having lived under a dictatorship myself, I can assure you that it takes time for meaningful change to occur within civil society and among those who held power for so long. It takes a long time for democracy to really take root and for real changes to emerge.
I am not talking only about changes to legislation, since constitutions can be changed and highly productive people can be put to work in the institutions. I am also talking about changes in the social conscience, not only among workers, but also among those who hold political power and those who hold economic power. That is very important.
The link between political and economic power should lead those people to adapt to a new vision. This does not happen overnight; it can take a generation before these changes really happen. People need to believe in the future and press on.
To further my research on unions, I went to Amnesty International. I learned that a lot of things are happening in South Korea, but I still thought that we should not expect that country to be as advanced as ours. After reading some documents, I learned that this year there was a strike at Samsung and the union leader, Yeom Ho-seok, who was 34 years old, took his own life in his car on May 17.
This union leader explained his actions in a letter: “I sacrifice myself because I cannot bear to see any longer the sacrifice and pain of others as well as the difficult situation of fellow union members”. We are not talking about 1987; we are talking about 2014.
Jamie Doucette, a lecturer in Human Geography at University of Manchester and an expert on labour and democratization in South Korea, explains that “Samsung's refusal to recognize itself as the employer of unionized workers conforms to a standard corporate practice in South Korea”.
That is why I am saying that we cannot expect miracles. I think our Canadian companies really have a duty to help not only the leaders of South Korean companies but also the country's political leaders to understand what the real values of workers and unions are. In that sense, Canada has a lot to offer.
We all know that South Korea has a very dynamic economy. Environmentally speaking, it has made real progress, which is a great thing. Its GDP is also very high.
However, the situation of its workers really worries me. We must and we can do better with these agreements. This should be Canada's trademark. We are capable of exporting these visions and ways of doing things. That costs nothing. All we need to do is share best practices.
I would like to go back in time a little. I am thinking about the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement that we signed back in 2008, but have discussed recently in Parliament.
I was invited to go to Colombia last summer along with a group of Canadian union members and so I went. I had an opportunity to visit the country, although I was accompanied by journalists. It does not matter. I was able to see how little respect some Canadian companies showed their Colombian workers and how they felt entitled to pollute, which they would never do here in Canada, and certainly not in the way they are doing in Colombia.
To conclude, we are going to support this agreement. However, I hope that we will take extra steps to ensure that workers' rights are upheld under these agreements.
We, as members of Parliament, are about to allow major Canadian companies to set up shop in other countries. However, these companies must act as true ambassadors of Canadian values and of respect for working conditions and human rights.