Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House. Today I want to speak to Bill C-50, which is an act to amend certain acts as a result of the accession of the People's Republic of China to the agreement establishing the WTO, the World Trade Organization.
Bill C-50 seeks to amend the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act, the Customs Tariff, the Export and Import Permits Act and the Special Import Measures Act in order to protect Canadian industries from being overwhelmed by new Chinese imports resulting from that country's accession to the WTO. The proposed amendments are specific to Canada's trade with China and do not impact on trade with other countries, nor does Bill C-50 impact on the accession of China to the WTO, which happened in December of this past year; rather, it proposes changes to Canadian legislation to deal with this fact.
I thought it would be useful for the House to have me to look at our party's policy with regard to China over the past 50 plus years. Our party's predecessor, the Commonwealth Co-operative Federation, the CCF, consistently supported Canadian recognition of Peking and the people's republic and its admission to the United Nations on the grounds that to exclude the de facto government of the most populous nation on the earth from the council of nations was an absurdity that endangered both world peace and security.
When the NDP was founded in 1961 we picked up that cause at our founding convention and led the fight for recognition of China and its admission to the United Nations, which culminated in 1970 with an exchange of ambassadors between Peking and Ottawa and the eventual admission of China to the United Nations the following year. In part the party's position was a reflection of the fact that the NDP membership was generally more internationalist than the old line parties and in part it was linked to the party's broader theme of developing an independent foreign policy, that is, independent from that of the United States.
Under the leadership of T.C. Douglas, we also advocated the inclusion of China in international trade and economic agreements, broader cultural and intellectual contacts between China and the west and an invitation for China to join with the other four nuclear powers in working toward disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation agreements. That was important because China had become a nuclear power with the explosion of its first atomic bomb in 1964.
In 1989 when I had the privilege of being the federal secretary of our party, the federal council passed a major resolution on the Asia-Pacific region that called for:
a comprehensive Asia-Pacific policy...based on the principles of common security which promote international cooperation and recognize that environmental, development and human rights issues are all intrinsically related to security.
With respect to China, the resolution said specifically:
New Democrats have great admiration and respect for the Chinese people. We deplore the Chinese regime's massacre of its own people in Tiananmen Square and we are very concerned about the increasing repression of the regime in recent months. We strongly object to the occupation of Tibet and the human rights abuses that have taken place there.
Further on Tiananmen Square, it was the member for Winnipeg--Transcona who on June 5, 1989, in the House condemned the inexplicable actions of the Chinese government at Tiananmen Square and called on the Canadian government to communicate, in the strongest possible way, Canada's outrage at those brutal deaths and the injuries against thousands of young people who had the spirit for greater democracy. That member stated our party's respect for the Chinese revolution and its many achievements for the Chinese people and our collective dismay that the revolution, which began with so much passion for social justice, should come to such a brutal point that the People's Liberation Army was firing on its own people. That speech condemned the “gross violation of human rights” and urged the Canadian government to do everything in its power to ensure that the killing was stopped and the road to democratization, which the students so ably represented, was resumed.
The Asia-Pacific policy was passed by our party in 1989 and the resolution also raised concerns about the environmental implications of some forms of development and condemned Canadian assistance for such projects. For example, the Canadian government's participation in the Three Gorges dam project in China appeared to be motivated more by the possibility of lucrative contracts for Canadian multinationals than concern for the welfare of the people living in the vicinity of the project. Environmentalists warned that the project could have enormous environmental implications that would seriously endanger the health of the neighbouring population and involve the dislocation of one million people.
With respect to the issue of the Three Gorges dam, in 1995 the member for Burnaby--Douglas urged our government to support a resolution at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with respect to China and to speak out against human rights abuses. He called for the withdrawal of Canadian support for both the Three Gorges dam and the sale of CANDU reactors to China.
The Asia-Pacific resolution also deplored the inattention of the Canadian government to growing militarization and nuclear proliferation in the Pacific Ocean and called on the government to pursue multilateral arms reduction talks aimed at reversing and destabilizing trends and moving toward the creation of a nuclear free and independent Pacific Rim.
As I mentioned at the outset, the People's Republic of China formally acceded to the WTO on December 11 last year after 15 years of negotiations with member states. It is a country of 1.3 billion people, has the world's seventh largest economy and is the ninth largest exporter. While many Canadian exporters are anxious to gain increased access to the vast Chinese market, many other Canadian industries fear that they may drown in the anticipated surge of Chinese imports.
New Democrats are currently opposing Bill C-50, the bill before us today, which amends various pieces of legislation, to protect Canadian industries from being overwhelmed by new Chinese imports resulting from China's accession to the WTO. Our opposition to the bill relates to our objections to China's accession, for a number of reasons.
First, China stands out internationally for its flagrant disregard of human rights. The WTO does not seek to enforce standards of human rights. It is concerned only with the facilitation of international trade. China is anxious to join the WTO to increase its export markets, however, the terms of accession permit a significant volume of agricultural goods to enter China, including exports from Canada, which presents a real threat to Chinese agricultural industries and rural Chinese communities although we note and believe that steps will be taken to ensure that those exports are in the minority, not the majority.
Workers in Chinese industries will be negatively impacted by increased trade under the WTO, including agriculture and automotives, because they have no recourse to collective bargaining or free trade unions. In March 2001 China ratified the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights, but filed a reservation under Article 8.1(a) to prevent workers from freely forming trade unions in that country.
In the Chinese automotive industry, which was referred to by the previous speaker, reduced tariffs under the WTO agreement will mean that exports will quickly flood the Chinese market, resulting in tremendous strain on workers in that country. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reports that 10 million Chinese auto workers are forecast to lose their jobs as a result of China's entry into the WTO. Also, as we all know and as is well documented, China also has an abysmal record on workplace health and safety.
The New Democratic Party does not oppose international trade. We strongly support fair trade but if Canada imports Chinese products manufactured by workers receiving paltry and substandard wages, subjected to unsafe working conditions and denied the right to organize and bargain collectively, then such trade cannot be considered in any way fair trade. Trade which results in the perpetuation or augmentation of global inequity is not fair trade.
We oppose the structure and secrecy of the World Trade Organization and believe that the accession of China to the WTO further legitimizes and perpetuates a system which ignores international labour standards and fundamental environmental concerns resulting from its trading regime and consistently rejects efforts to correct these inadequacies. Our trade policy specifically opposes expanding trade on those terms.
Three years ago the NDP resolved to demand that the government make binding and enforceable protections of core labour rights an integral feature of all international agreements on trade and investment to which this country is a party. We further insisted that before there is any additional trade or investment liberalization at the WTO, that organization itself must deal with social, environmental, labour and human rights issues in an enforceable manner or that other international agreements and institutions, which concern themselves with issues like labour and the environment, be given the teeth necessary to sanction behaviour that violates agreed upon statements.
In other words, what we are saying is that we want something similar to the European Union and the pact that exists there where environmental standards and labour regulations are built into that agreement. We do not have that under the WTO and we certainly do not have it under the free trade agreement or the NAFTA.
International trade has been heralded for too long as the solution to global poverty and underdevelopment. The truth is that when trade is conducted under the auspices of fundamentally undemocratic organizations controlled by the corporations they are designed to serve, trade will only perpetuate global inequality and poverty.
I also want to put on the record our concerns about one of the latest human rights violations that is taking place in China, and that is the repression of groups like the Falun Gong petitioners. We were discouraged when we learned that when Canada had the opportunity to pick up the slack and speak out on this issue at an international forum, we dropped the ball and chose not to speak. This is contrary to what the member for Mount Royal said, a member who I give full credit and marks to for speaking to this issue in an all party human rights caucus. He said:
--we are witnessing the most persistent and pervasive assault on human rights in China since Tiananmen Square [in 1989].
The member said that the current Chinese government denies peoples' religious freedoms, systematically suppresses independent political activities, imprisons political opponents, violates rights to free speech and has conducted a crackdown on writers and activists.
Given the work of that member and that all party committee, it is unfortunate that the Canadian government remained silent this week at an international forum when it could have spoken out loudly and should have.
In conclusion, for Canada the implications of China's accession to the WTO are less clear. We negotiated a favourable deal that allows for 12 years of domestic protection during which threatened industries intend to prepare for increased competition from imports. Whether that turns out to be sufficient protection remains to be seen.
Canadians exporters and service providers will indeed gain much increased access to the Chinese market in that transition period. Whether or not Canadian production will migrate to China in search of cheaper labour any more than it already has, also cannot be determined at this time.
We in our party oppose the WTO in principle. It is for this reason that we oppose Bill C-50. The WTO is undemocratic in the sense that there is no parliamentary oversight of its operations. There is no opportunity for the views of concerned citizens to be heard. Its rulings are made by tribunals in secret. It has consistently resisted the imposition of human rights requirements on its trading regime.
The WTO has ignored calls for international labour standards to be enforced. It has consistently ignored environmental concerns resulting from its trading regime. The WTO is at heart an organization designed to facilitate corporate globalization through the removal of barriers to trade and the undermining of national sovereignty.
