Madam Speaker, with regard to this agreement, we have talked about labour rights and I want to underline the fact that Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries on earth for trade unionists. We have had examples given by my hon. colleague, the member for Winnipeg Centre, and others who are saying that these folks are regularly victims of violence, intimidation and assassination.
This agreement does not have any kind of tough labour laws or labour standards. By putting these labour provisions in a side agreement, outside of the main text and without any enforcement mechanism, will not encourage Colombia to improve its horrendous human rights situation for workers and will actually justify the use of violence.
That is something that we have talked about here and I believe warrants more thought and consideration.
This agreement also does not really address the environment issue. It is addressed in a side agreement with no enforcement mechanism to force Canada or Colombia to respect environmental rights.
Then we come to another point that we have not really talked about a lot and that is the investor chapter. This is copied from NAFTA's chapter 11 which provides powerful rights to private companies to sue governments, enforceable through investor state arbitration panels.
I find this particularly worrying because of our many Canadian multinational oil and mining companies operating in Colombia. The arbitration system set up by chapter 11 gives foreign companies the ability to challenge legitimate Canadian environmental labour and social laws here in Canada. It will give the same opportunity to foreign companies in Colombia. I think this is absurd.
If we look at chapter 11 and what has happened in Canada as a result of this clause, we see that for example in early April American chemical company Dow sued the federal government for $2 million in damages it claimed it would suffer from Quebec's cosmetic pesticide law. This is absurd, a foreign company suing a Canadian government that wants to protect its citizens.
We have seen that our tax dollars have been used by the Canadian government to pay Ethyl Corporation, $13 million to be exact, for an out of court settlement following a challenge filed on April 14, 1997, to Canada's ban on the import and interprovincial trade of gasoline additive MMT, a suspected neurotoxin.
The list goes on and on. Our government has been challenged by chapter 11 of NAFTA and now we want to transport this clause to Colombia so that other multinationals including ours can challenge their laws. For this reason alone, we should not be signing this agreement.
We look at agriculture tariffs. We look at Colombia's poverty. We know that in Colombia 22% of the employment is in agriculture. An end to tariffs for cereals, pork and beef, although favourable to us, the trading partner, will flood the market with cheap products and lead to thousands of lost jobs.
We have seen this in Mexico. We have seen that 30% of the corn in Mexico consumed now is imported from the United States, which is heavily subsidized corn. It has displaced over two million and up to fifteen million, I am not sure of the exact count, farmers from the land who have not been able to compete with produce coming in from out of the country.
Personally, I do not think that Canadians would want to see their farmers being displaced because of goods coming into our country. Surely there must be a way to have fair trade in these commodities between our countries and not trade which displaces farmers off the land.
I would like to talk about the fact that in any trade agreement, it is essential for fair trade to ensure full respect of human rights. The Canada-Colombia agreement is fundamentally flawed. It only tentatively addresses the issue, and does nothing to improve the serious problem with human rights in Colombia.
By ratifying the trade agreement with Colombia, Canada would be condoning a dangerous regime that is involved in acts of violence and murder against its own citizens. We heard a number of examples in our discussions today. The “kill a trade unionist, pay a fine” provision is ridiculous. It is particularly offensive. Under this provision, when a trade unionist is killed in Colombia, the government would simply have to pay into a development fund, up to a maximum of $15 million per year. That is unacceptable.
The Canada-Colombia agreement is essentially a reproduction of the outdated trade approach taken by former President George Bush. In the United States, Congress put a hold on the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement last year, and President Barack Obama has said he will not pursue the agreement because of the human rights abuses. If our neighbour to the south had second thoughts about this agreement, the least we could do is carefully examine the agreement before us today and not blindly accept it.
In 2008, the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade recommended that we not sign any agreements with Colombia until they have improved their human rights record. It also recommended that we conduct a human rights impact assessment to determine the real repercussions of a trade agreement. The government completely disregarded this report. This is another example of how the government does not listen to its own committees, in this case, the Standing Committee on International Trade.
Members in this House have said that they will support this bill. The Standing Committee on International Trade published a report in June 2006 recommending that Canada not sign and implement a free trade agreement with Colombia before conducting an independent, impartial, and comprehensive human rights impact assessment. That was recommendation No. 4.
I would also like to applaud and thank my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster for the work he has done to raise awareness of the facts we are talking about today and for the work he has done with parliamentarians from other countries to show that this is not really a free trade agreement. This is an agreement for huge multinational corporations that want to enjoy the same benefits in Colombia as they do here in Canada, corporations that were not protected with all of the free trade agreements like NAFTA or the agreement that may now be finalized, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.
Some may not agree with what is happening here. For instance, some may think that NAFTA has not helped Canadian agricultural producers. Twenty years ago, beef producers earned twice as much as they do now. That was just before we signed the free trade agreement with the United States. We are always being told that markets have to be opened up. The market for beef has tripled in size, and we are now exporting three times as much beef as we were 20 years ago, yet producers are earning half as much as they were then.
That is one outcome of the so-called free trade agreement we signed. The same thing happened to cherry producers this summer. They had the best harvest ever, but they lost money because we imported U.S. cherries thanks to the so-called free trade agreement with the United States. That is why we have to be so careful and really think about what is being proposed.
