Mr. Speaker, today I am here as a stand-in for the great member for Sault Ste. Marie. I would just like to inform his constituents that he is not well. He has been burning the candle at both ends and he is not able to do his speech. He had it ready and threw me some notes. I kind of feel like I felt once during the last term when I got here with about half a minute to go and I did not really know what I was going to say. Papers were flowing all over the place. However, I have a little more experience now so hopefully I will be okay.
Free trade and NAFTA are debates that have been going on this country since we had the debate on whether or not to have the free trade agreement with the United States. We have heard today in the House many reasons for the idea of having open borders and free trade with our neighbour. On the other hand, many people feel that the agreement that was initially signed and subsequent agreements, such as NAFTA, have been detrimental to the prosperity of our country.
I suspect the answer lies somewhere in between and I would lean more to the detrimental side than to the other. Having said that, however, it is true that the agreement has opened up jobs, but on the other hand, we have lost close to 300,000 manufacturing jobs in this country alone.
We have gained jobs but often the jobs that have been created are part time or are not well-paying jobs. We analyzed it and some analysts have looked at the agreement. As a result of free trade, the average working family, those people who need to make a halfway decent living to survive, are worse off than they were before.
If we look at the area of agriculture, which I will go into a little more later, there have been some advantages but there have been many instances where it has really hurt our farmers. I will then actually talk a bit about the agreement and what it may be leading into, and that is a security and prosperity partnership.
As I came into the House today, I brought my bundle of work, as I usually do, and I happened to notice a letter from Mr. Armstrong of Kaslo, which is very timely. I was about to answer the letter but maybe I will be able to comment a bit on what he says here and share it with my colleagues in the House.
On the second page of his letter, he is concerned about the budget and has suggestions as to where we should go. He says, ”It is time to act as an independent country rather than an appendage of the U.S. I have two thoughts here. One is to renegotiate NAFTA. Eliminate Chapter 11. Corporations shouldn't have the right to sue governments and supersede national laws. Trade tribunals lack adequate transparency and accountability, and consistently reflect a strong pro-corporate bias”.
I am not sure if many people in Canada know that since we negotiated NAFTA, corporations on both sides of the border can sue local governments. There has been a case of a Canadian corporation suing the California government because of its strong environmental laws. There are a number of documented cases where American corporations have sued and other corporations from other countries are suing our governments because of restrictions that they wish to impose on the environment with the idea that they want to protect their citizens.
It seems ludicrous to me that we have allowed our negotiators to sign an agreement that allows foreign corporations to sue our governments so that our tax dollars go to pay out or to finance the legal proceedings to protect our citizens. It does seem bizarre. Therefore, when Mr. Armstrong says that we should renegotiate NAFTA, he might have a point there. Which other country in the world has signed away an agreement to allow corporations to sue representatives of the people?
I would like to go further.The other contentious point of the whole NAFTA is the clause that says that we are locked into selling our oil and gas to the United States at a locked-in price, that we cannot cut back on our exports unless we cut back on our domestic consumption, which basically means that we have locked in our energy flow to the benefit of our neighbours to the south. We have been and continue to be a provider of raw materials to our neighbours to the south without having any control.
However, what is bizarre, if we look at what is happening east of Ottawa, is that we import 90% of our oil from offshore. On the one hand, we are selling our oil cheaply, allowing it to flow to the United States and we are building pipelines, and yet here we are importing 90% of our oil from other countries and areas of the world that may potentially be dangerous and from which, in the future, we may not be able to get our oil.
Mr. Armstrong also talks about NAFTA and says that we should to get NAFTA out of food of agriculture. As I said before, I do not think it is one way or the other. We need to look at this but I believe that we in Canada should be looking at any trade agreements we sign through the lens of a Canadian, in other words, is it in the best interests of Canada to do this or that agreement? We have seen the recent bill that was passed in the House, unfortunately, that now allows European countries to partake in more of the shipbuilding industry and take away jobs in Canada. I would say that signed agreement would be to our detriment. We lose Canadian jobs and our industry continues to downslide as a result of that agreement. I do not think that is right.
When I look at agriculture, a couple of things that stand out in my mind, which I talk about this a lot. One of them is the whole idea of dumping, and I will use the example of American apples, in our country. Because of NAFTA, we have allowed the free flow of fruit and vegetables across the border and what has happened from time to time is that the heavily subsidized apple industry in the United States has dumped apples at a price below the cost of production into Canadian markets.
A tribunal exists to regulate this but by the time we get things in motion and by the time the lawyers are hired, often it is too late and by that time the apple producer has lost money. What has happened as a result of this? Many producers in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia have gone out of business. In the area that I represent, a lot of apple and fruit growers are converting to grapes because they are not able to make a living. One of the reasons for that is this agreement we have.
In our province, I would like to remind other members, that before free trade we had something like a thousand onion producers. Now we have maybe a handful. We can see that we are getting cheap produce in our supermarkets but there are many farmers who have lost their livelihood because of these trade agreements. I do not think, as we move on to explore export markets and different markets for our produce, we should be doing it on the backs of those producers here in Canada.
I want to talk a bit about the cattle industry and refer to a report that was published in November of last year by the National Farmers Union, entitled “The Farm Crisis and the Cattle Sector: Toward a New Analysis and New Solutions”.
I am pleased to report that we have talked and we have discussed, and we will have this report before our agriculture committee where we will be able to have an in-depth look at it.
One of the areas in the report concerns what is happening. What has happened to the effect that before the Canadian-U.S. agreement was signed in 1989, our cattle producers were making close to around $200 a hundredweight. I checked this out last night at a banquet as I was talking to some folks. Now, when we level the different year and the dollar, they are making less than $100. Exports have tripled, primarily to the United States, to around $33 billion a year. They have tripled during this time span. Our cattle producers are making less than they were 20 years. Costs are going up, which we will be talking about in committee, exports have gone up and we have created new markets but they are making less money and many are being forced out of business.
I have another phone call that I received from one of my constituents near Keremeos in the Similkameen area. He cannot make it any more as a business because of the high cost of input and the low cost he is receiving for his goods. Why did these prices fall? It coincides with our signing of NAFTA.
According to the report, in May 1989, Cargill opened its High River, Alberta beef packing plant. Its entry into the country's beef packing sector marked a dramatic acceleration in the transfer of control in the industry from a relatively large number of Canadian-based packers operating a large number of plants to two U.S.-based corporations that have concentrated production into a few huge plants.
Also in January 1989, “We implemented the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement thereby shifting Canada-U.S. market integration into high gear”.
As a result of this, and this has happened in other sectors, the more takeover there has been of Canadian business, the more difficult it has become for the primary producer in our country. Another follow-up of this whole agreement that is affecting the cattle industry is what we call captive supply. The big players like Cargill can hold and feed a number of cattle and then let them out in the market when the price is right, thereby undercutting the producer who is shipping his cattle to auction.
Those are some examples and, as I said, we will be debating this at agriculture committee. I know many people have read the report and it will be interesting to get some good feedback on this.
The other item, when we look at free trade, is the pressure at the negotiations going on at the World Trade Organization. Last night I had the honour of being invited to the banquet, as many colleagues have, of the Dairy Farmers of Canada. Farmers have been here for the last two days talking to us and asking to please not give in to world pressure to modify or destroy our supply management.
I would like to make the plea to please not give in to world pressure, not only to destroy our supply management, but to water down, or withdraw, or disintegrate our state trading enterprise, namely the Canadian Wheat Board. It is our business to do what we want to do, not from pressure from the WTO on supply management and the Wheat Board. I am hoping that the minister and the government will stand strong in defending our interests against this pressure.
As we move on, we see other effects of free trade agreements. My colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster has clearly outlined many times in the House the negative effect of the softwood lumber agreement. I have seen the devastating effect in my communities, in the forestry communities that have suffered, because we chose not to follow through with the legal process that we had. We signed the agreement and lost money. We see the effects of that with what is happening now in our forestry communities.
I will now come to the topic of buy Canadian, buy American, is this protectionism or is it not. It is my understanding that the discussions going on in the United States in regard to buy American do fall within the framework of the free trade agreement. If that is the case and the Americans can have that, why can we not, while still maintaining our ties and our trade, offer preference in certain industries to local Canadian procurement? At the same time, instead of pushing and raising the voice against the violation of this agreement, why can we not work with our partners to ensure that if the policy goes through in their country that there is an exemption for Canadian steel? If the policy goes through in our country, then why can we not we exempt the industry that is supplying our citizens here in Canada.
I need a question to pose to my colleagues. We are in tough economic times and we want to support industry. However, I have seen in my home province of British Columbia that we have purchased ferries to go between Vancouver Island and the Mainland from outside of the country and we have a shipbuilding industry here on both coasts.
The argument is that we got them for less. Of course we got them for less. The reason we got them for less is the people who are building them are probably making the equivalent of $2 an hour in some country that is on the way to being developed. Of course we can get them for less, and at the same time, our Canadian workers and their families suffer because of this kind of policy.
We talked about food security at the agriculture committee. We had a unanimous report, with the exception of one item. Everyone agreed to the various recommendations on food security. One of them was that Canada have a national procurement policy so that federal government institutions have as their priority to buy Canadian. We all agreed on that. It was agreed to by all the parties. We do agree on many items in our committee. The response we got back from the department was that we have to be careful of our trade obligations.
Yet we have seen with our partner to the south, in spite of the trade obligations, problems at our border. There was the BSE crisis. Tariffs have been slapped on other agricultural produce. Different tariffs that exist to this very day have been slapped on goods being shipped down to the south because the Americans decided to do that within the trade agreement.
Especially in these tough times it is important that we support our industry as much as possible. How can it be that our Department of National Defence signed a contract for military trucks with a U.S. company that actually operates in Canada but which will build the trucks in Texas? Meanwhile that company's plant in Chatham, Ontario, which is completely capable of doing that work, is laying off hundreds of people. It is hard to imagine why our own tax dollars are not being used to support our industry and our workers.
In a recent Vector poll nine out of ten Canadians said that the government should favour Canadian made goods in public transit. Stronger domestic procurement has also been supported by groups like the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. In recent months over a dozen municipalities have passed resolutions committing to maximize Canadian content when purchasing goods and services.
I would like to close by commenting on the latest dispute about the American steel policy. Rather than calling it a trade war and a violation of the agreements, we have to look carefully to see what is behind it. I read an article which said that what might be behind the policy are the strong American corporations that have offshore plants in other countries which would very much love not to have to adhere to a buy American policy so they could continue to make steel in other countries and bring it into the United States. The article presumes that maybe they are behind foreign governments, such as ours, lobbying the Americans to do away with this policy.
It is a point of view which I think is worthwhile exploring. I would suggest to the government and to the minister that we look at that. Are we being duped? Are we as Canadians once again being duped by the multinationals that want to ensure that they have free access to the American and Canadian markets without any kind of control either by the Americans or the Canadians?
That is everything I wanted to say. I am ready to take questions.
