Deepak Obhrai

[International Trade, February 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the government just concluded a trade mission to China and close to 300 companies participated. These companies obviously know that it is a market with huge opportunities, yet CIDA has poured over $1 billion in aid money into China since the government took power. Yemen is a poor country in the Middle East that is a beacon of democracy and needs our help.

Clearly the government's foreign and trade policies are in an awful mess. Why these misplaced priorities? Why?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the word is “engaged”. Yes, we should engage. We cannot isolate them. We are pushing up the human rights abuses from what we see when we isolate countries. I agree with him that we should engage the countries. The issue is how to do it.

What is the most effective way to engage the countries when talking about child labour and all those other issues? The best way from my perspective is to tell them that if they do not change their laws, if they do not meet the ILO requirements and if they do not meet the international treaties that have been signed, then we will have a concern about dealing with them. We cannot just stick our heads in the sand and think nothing is going on around the world. I agree with the member, but which is the right way to engage the countries to get the best results?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I forgot to advise you that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Macleod.

The hon. member's question is precisely what I was talking about and why I raised the question about whether this was the right approach to take.

Human rights is one of those values that Canadians want to see in our foreign policy. Human rights is a very strong value that Canadians are looking for in our foreign policy. That will only come if we have a concentrated policy.

What we could have now, if the government breaks up these departments, is the new department of international trade deciding that trade is all together separate from human rights. It may go in the direction of only following trade and saying that trade and human rights are not linked.

This is a Canadian value and Canadians are concerned about human rights. Canadians would like human rights to be up in the forefront as does my party.

To answer the member's question, human rights is one of our concerns as well, which is why we are saying that we will not support the bill until it goes to the committee where these issues can be brought forward and addressed, and where we can hear what departmental officials and the government have to says about this.

What we have right now is the government's unilateral policy out there. It has decided this is the way it is going to go without any other questions being answered as were asked by the hon. member.

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-31, which would create a department called International Trade Canada.

I am the critic for my party for emerging markets. The parliamentary secretary just gave an eloquent speech on how emerging markets are important for Canada. I have absolutely no bone to pick on why emerging markets are important for Canada. As he said, Canada is a trading nation. Over 40% of our GDP is based on trade. Over 80% of our trade is with our southern neighbours but we are looking at new and emerging markets offering us opportunities that we need to grab.

However what we are talking about is Bill C-31, a bill that would divide one department into two departments. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade would be split into two departments. On that aspect we do have some concerns.

My colleague, the member for Newmarket--Aurora, our trade critic for the Conservative Party, spoke very eloquently to this bill some time back and expressed the concerns the Conservative Party has with this approach.

Being the trade critic involved here for a couple of years and being on the foreign affairs committee, let me go back and give my observations.

Canada's international relationships are run by two departments: the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, which takes care of the aid aspect; and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade was joined together by the former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau because he thought there would be a cohesive policy from Canada that would take Canadian strategic interests into account when dealing with foreign issues, which at that given time was thought to be the right approach to take.

However I now know for a fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs was following the same thinking and the same approach in reference to CIDA and it wanted to take over CIDA. From the time when I was an international trade and development critic I know the mandarins in Foreign Affairs felt that if CIDA were brought under their umbrella they could again move into a more cohesive approach dealing with foreign aid, human rights issues and all these things, and make policies in Foreign Affairs that would reflect Canadian values.

However over a period of time the government resisted CIDA going under this umbrella for the simple reason that it was using CIDA as a department which it could “buy influence” overseas in countries where it went to work for Canada, and most important, we have records showing that CIDA was used as an agency that rewarded Liberal businesses very well.

I have been around the world and I have seen CIDA. CIDA officials are different from Foreign Affairs officials and trade officials. CIDA officials do not coordinate their efforts with others. CIDA marches to its own tune as does Foreign Affairs and yet we say that we have a cohesive strategy and that we work together for the interests of Canada. That is not true.

Let us take the example of China. CIDA is still today giving foreign aid to China when the parliamentary secretary just stood up in the House and said how good China was doing, 8% annually. If China is doing so well, why is CIDA giving it money? It did the same thing for India.

No, there is no cohesive policy out there when it comes to international relations. We now have the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. What we are wondering is why and how the Prime Minister of Canada decided that he needed to break these two departments and make them separate. We do not know. Nobody knows. He just decided to do it, despite the fact that this was a functioning department. What is the benefit? What is the cost analysis? Has anyone done it?

Where does CIDA fit into this picture? We now have CIDA and the new departments of trade and foreign affairs. How will they coordinate one policy for foreign affairs? The Prime Minister said there would be a foreign policy review. One would think that the government would do a foreign policy review first before coming to this kind of a conclusion, but, no, that did not take place.

We do not know whether the foreign policy review will come or what will happen. Decisions have been made without, what we think, is a proper analysis of whether it is in the best interest of Canada's foreign policy.

We in the Conservative Party believe we should send this bill to the foreign affairs committee where it can be studied properly and recommendations can be made as to whether this is the right approach in which to go in the long term interests of Canada. That should be a logical, common sense decision but it seems to be lost on the other side.

We have the parliamentary secretary making speeches about emerging markets but what we are talking about is whether this the right approach to take.

I envision going overseas where we have these three officers, the ambassador from foreign affairs, the CIDA individual and the trade individual, sitting in separate rooms and going about their separate turf wars. Meanwhile, where would Canada's foreign policy be on the issues of interest to Canadians?

What will happen? Will we be coming back here and saying that we made a mistake and that we should bring it back? This is a very important decision and it is not one to be taken lightly.

We want to know whether this is the right approach to take. We do not know and therefore we will not be supporting the bill. We want the bill to go to the foreign affairs committee where it can do a thorough analysis of what this is all about.

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have travelled with the parliamentary secretary on two trade missions and what he just said was fine. I do not think that there is any doubt about what he just said about the importance of international trade, what has happened, and how Canadian businesses are out there engaging with the new realities of international trade and emerging markets.

However, today his subject is Bill C-31 and he completely missed the point. He completely ignored the questions that have been raised in the House. Why is there a need to break up these two departments, the Departments of Foreign Affairs and International Trade? He did not answer this question.

Was there a deeper analysis done to determine if it would be in the longer term interest of Canada if this department was by itself? He did not answer that.

When his Prime Minister came into power, he said there would be a foreign policy review. How come a decision was made before this foreign policy came about?

These are the questions and everybody is wondering if he will now leave his nice, flowery words, and get on with the business and answer these questions.

[Supply, February 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is quite an interesting question and it shows there is something seriously wrong with the way we look at the whole issue of trade. His point illustrated quite clearly that there is something wrong with the way in which we do business and that we have not addressed the issue very well.

What we have done over here is that we have addressed the issue of signing the agreements and everything but on the other hand we have closed our eyes to what is actually happening out there. In coming back to the duties, he rightly pointed out in his question the need for an adequate response.

We have to look at the whole picture to see where we can close the loopholes and where we can strengthen the industry. We cannot just strengthen the industry by giving the industry money. A lot of other issues need to be addressed. We need to see the whole picture, which is the adequate response that he was talking about, which the government has not done.

[Supply, February 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what my colleague has identified here is one of the fundamental problems that we now see happening, which is that while we cite trade agreements and everything, we have to go one more step forward. The one more step forward is that we need to maintain relations with our trading partners. We simply cannot get up and begin bashing our trading partners and at the same time expect favourable treatment from them.

We need to understand that we can disagree with our trading partners, but we do not need to go down to the level of personal insult that we saw taking place last year on the governing side. There was no action taken by the last government in addressing those issues.

Naturally there will be smaller frictions taking place and those frictions are going to impact ordinary Canadians. In the trade deals that we cite, and as softwood lumber and BSE indicate, yes, those other trading partners can turn their backs on us and go to where people are more friendly to them. In this case, maybe it is the southern border, but who knows?

The world is wide open. Everyone out there wants to deal with each other and wants to do work. It is up to us to make sure that while signing a trade agreement we also maintain those relationships in order to ensure that whatever was our objective in signing these deals does not come back to haunt us and impact our own Canadian citizens. In these cases, it is workers in the member's riding and workers in other ridings who are losing jobs due to BSE or it is the textile workers.

It is critically important that we have an overall policy here. We cannot pick and choose when we sign a trade deal and say that everything is fine. There is no picking and choosing. We must sit down and say that this is strategically important for us. Trade is strategically important for us. We can respectfully disagree, but we do not need to insult our trading partners.

[Supply, February 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure for me to speak today on the Bloc motion that has been put forward to address one very important, fundamental issue that is taking place in this country, that is, the free trade, the business environment and globalization change that has taken place in the last 10 to 15 years since the WTO was formed.

I want to say at the outset that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Cambridge.

Since the WTO was formed there has been a fundamental change in the way the world sees how business is to be conducted and in how Canada needs to conduct its business. Canada is a trading nation. Our prosperity lies in trade. Close to 46% of our GDP is in international trade, so international trade does become a very critical part of Canada's long term planning to have a good standard of living.

To that end, the Conservative Party and I have always been in support of free trade. It has been my pleasure to attend WTO meetings in Seattle and in Doha. At the time I attended, it became very evident that the fundamental changes taking place around the globe with the opening of the markets and globalization would have a profound impact on countries like ours and even on developing countries as well.

We knew that the day would come when we in Canada would be facing the questions that we face today. As we look around, we see crises brewing, with a crisis in BSE, a crisis in softwood lumber and now a crisis in the textile industry, all directly related to our trade agreements.

It leads us to wonder, when we signed the trade deals of which we are very supportive, did we do enough studies? Did we recognize the impact they were going to have on our domestic industries and on Canadians? At that time I stood in the House in support of all those agreements and thought we had done so, and yes, we had trade agreements that would address these issues.

NAFTA was an agreement to allow us to have open access to the American market. We supported the free trade area of the Americas so that we could have access there; of course the FTAA has not started. We went to the WTO because we wanted fair trade and a rules based system whereby we could trade freely with stronger economies like those of the U.S.A. and now the European Union.

We supported all these agreements, but we also thought that the government with all its resources would understand the impact they would have on the domestic industries. I was on one of the trade missions in India when it opened up its markets. Its workers were facing a crisis in light industry as well. Today in the U.S.A. and in Canada, we can see the IT crisis taking place. The presidential election focused on the IT sector because of the same crisis facing the domestic industry. It has been happening everywhere, so we should have known this was coming.

As I listen to this debate today, I hear the Liberals talking about how much they have done for the textile industry to help the textile industry become competitive and more modernized and all these things. The facts speak differently.

This Bloc motion talks about six industries closing down in Huntingdon. The colleague next to me has had job losses in his riding as well. As we see, there are job losses happening. It was anticipated that there would be change and job losses, but we needed to be prepared for these days to arrive and not wait until the end and then say, “Oh, now we have to do something. Now we will run around and do something”. That is the typical Liberal approach: waiting right to the end before starting to do anything.

Today's speeches the Liberal members are making about how much money they have given or what they have given are of no comfort to the workers who have lost or who will be losing their jobs. They want to know what is in store for them. If they had had time, they could have prepared for retraining. The government could have made sure that other areas were there which would be viable in a long term solution working with industry.

We have a letter from the industry representatives in which they have given some excellent proposals, but the government seems not to have listened. All this government thinks is that if it throws money around it will be fine and this problem will go away.

This problem will not go away in the textile industry with the WTO agreements that we have signed. And let us be very blunt about it: we need the WTO because we are a smaller economy and we can be marginalized out of the world economy by others.

We need the WTO, but we have enough time and resources to think about how we can address this changing environment and not wait until we face this crisis of workers losing their jobs.

One of the reasons why the Conservative Party will support the Bloc motion is to tell the government that it has failed in its response, its obligation and its duty to Canadians. The BSE crisis and even the softwood lumber crisis really reflect the issue of what is wrong with our trading relationships. When we sign trade agreements, we also need to ensure that there are teeth behind our trade agreements. We must not just run around and say that we have signed a trade agreement and it is great for us, only to find out later on that it is not great for us.

Insofar as the textile industry is concerned, where the job losses are, I can address the issue. I was here and I applauded when the government allowed the least developed countries free access to our country, because I had attended the conference in Geneva on the least developed countries and that was one of the areas where the government could help them. But as my colleague from Edmonton indicated, while opening up our market we ensured that others would take advantage of that, not the least developed countries. Economies like China's, Pakistan's and India's could access our markets through the back door. That was not the intent when I stood in support of the initiative.

It boils down to the fact that this government had not been preparing itself for the changing global environment that it knew was happening. That is why we are standing here today debating an issue which really should not have to be discussed. It should have been easy for us to stand and say that we have done this, we have done that, and so there will be no closures taking place. The textile industry, with this help, would have been more healthy than it is today. Today the Liberals stand and say that this portion of the textile industry is healthy while we have other portions closing down. The Liberals say that those portions are inefficient and everything, but they are all Canadian and we need to have programs that assist them.

I have only one minute left, so I will say in conclusion that while the Conservative Party supports free trade and we understand the impact that globalization will have, we must also make sure that Canadians do not unnecessarily suffer from this globalization and that we have programs and assistance packages to help them in this transition. At the same time, we must make sure that these industries are viable. Because opportunities always take place; when one door closes, another door opens. It is up to us to make sure that we take advantage of this and that we do not just run around the country signing trade deals without looking at what is happening in the background.

[Supply, February 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I note with much interest that it is the parliamentary secretary for health who is speaking on trade issues. That is quite an interesting response from the Liberals on this very important subject.

What brings this to our attention, and the Bloc motion recognizes this, is what is happening in the domestic industry. It seems to me that the Liberal government is rushing all the time to sign these trade deals, deals that seem to be desired by the government to put its signature on trade deals without doing a deeper analysis of how they will impact the domestic market.

There is no denying the fact that as a trading nation we need to sign trade deals to protect ourselves. There is no question that with 31 million people our prosperity lies in international trade and that will have an impact on domestic markets.

However, if we look at the crises that are now taking place in the beef industry with BSE, in the softwood industry, and now in the textile industry with the closure of six plants in Quebec, we all knew that this would happen. We all knew a long time ago in the WTO negotiations that we were moving in this direction. I was at the WTO meetings in Seattle and Doha.

What I fail to understand is why the government takes stopgap measures. It makes these announcements about stopgap measures to help our local Canadians who are impacted by these trade deals. Even now, the record of this government in assisting domestic Canadians in relation to these trade agreements is not something to be proud of. Someone asked the parliamentary secretary, what is the point? Why do you want to rush into signing trade agreements when you do not really do a thorough analysis of what is happening in the domestic industry?

[Black History Month, February 1st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure on behalf of the official opposition to rise in recognition that February is Black History Month in Canada.

For more than 300 years Canadians of African descent have been making outstanding contributions to our history, our communities and to building Canada as a whole. It is fitting that as a nation we recognize those contributions in this way.

Black History Month is a time for all Canadians to reflect on the rich heritage we enjoy as a result of the hard work and immense sacrifice of Canada's black communities. Canada has benefited immensely from the contributions made by black communities across our land. Our multicultural fabric is further strengthened by their efforts.

I note with great pride that Canada continues to be a welcoming home to new Canadians of African descent from all parts of the African continent.