Erin Weir

[Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 13th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan dismissed concerns about the investor-state provisions of CETA by saying that provisions of trade agreements need to be subject to some sort of adjudication. I wonder if he would agree with investor rights being subject to the same dispute resolution process as the rest of the agreement.

Certainly what New Democrats are concerned about is not having an adjudication process, but creating an entirely separate adjudication process just for investor rights, which privileges them over many other rights and considerations.

[Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 10th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I would note that NDP members have said very clearly and consistently for a long time that we object to investor-state provisions in trade agreements. When we are presented with trade agreements that do not include those provisions, we are much more likely to be able to support them. There are other provisions in trade agreements we would also look at and that would also affect our decision.

Whereas the Liberals and the Conservatives will automatically and reflexively support anything that is called a free trade agreement without weighing the pros and cons, how it will affect different sectors, or what other elements it includes, the NDP takes a very cautious, case-by-case approach. We try to evaluate the specific provisions of an agreement. We look at how it will affect different parts of our economy. We make the decision that way.

That is how middle-class Canadians, who the member references, would want our government to consider trade agreements. That is the approach we have taken in this case. Based on those types of careful deliberations, we are pleased to support the Canada-Ukraine agreement.

[Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 10th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.

The NDP is pleased to support the Canada-Ukraine agreement, because it is actually about trade. Canada currently runs a modest trade surplus with Ukraine, and we see a real potential for this deal, by removing tariffs to build upon that trade relationship to create jobs in Canada, and to make a contribution to the economy of the Ukraine as well. This is exactly the kind of agreement that the NDP is happy to support.

As members know, we are opposed to the agreement between Canada and the European Union. With the European Union, Canada currently runs a massive trade deficit, which would likely be enlarged by the agreement that would be a detraction from our economy and from employment in our country. That trade deficit is even larger, if we assume that the United Kingdom will be removed from the agreement as a result of Brexit.

There is a real contrast between these two agreements, in terms of the trade relationships that exist and that the agreements would likely amplify. However, an even bigger distinction has to do with the non-trade aspects of the Canada-Europe deal. The Canada-Europe agreement would extend the duration of pharmaceutical patents, which would drive up the price of prescription drugs for provincial health care systems, as well as for individual Canadians.

We are very pleased to note that those provisions are not present in the Canada-Ukraine deal, which gives us comfort in supporting it. We also note that the Canada-Europe agreement includes investor-state provisions, which empower foreign investors to directly challenge our democratic laws, regulations, and public policies, not in the regular court system, but in a special set of commercial tribunals to which most other sectors of society do not have access.

Again, we are very pleased with the fact that the Canada-Ukraine agreement does not include these pernicious investor-state provisions. Again, this makes us quite comfortable in supporting it.

Before question period, I asked the member for Calgary Nose Hill about why the Conservatives believe it is so important to have investor-state provisions in the Canada-Europe agreement. Given that Canada and Europe both have well functioning court systems, it is not obvious to me why we would need to set up these special tribunals for Canadian investors in Europe, or European investors in Canada. I did not get much of an answer to this question from the member for Calgary Nose Hill. There really was not an explanation as to why the Conservatives, or the Liberal government, for that matter, feel it is important to have investor-state provisions in the Canada-Europe deal.

However, the member for Calgary Nose Hill, in response, did suggest that the NDP not reflexively supporting anything and everything called a free trade agreement somehow puts us in the same camp as the Trump administration, and challenged me to explain our positions on trade vis-à-vis those of President Trump. I would like to take the opportunity to address that.

Mr. Trump has identified several real problems that exist with American trade. He has called attention to the problem of Chinese steel, produced in violation of internationally recognized environmental and labour standards, being dumped into the U.S. market, to the detriment of the American steel industry and American steelworkers.

We have exactly the same problem here in Canada with Chinese steel being dumped into our markets. My sense is that we need to work with the United States, and indeed with the Trump administration, to formulate a North America solution for this problem. If we do not do that, if the United States acts alone against Chinese steel dumping, a lot of that steel will be diverted into the Canadian market, which would hurt our industry and our steelworkers even more.

Worse yet, if Canada allows itself to be a conduit for dumped Chinese steel, we could make ourselves a target for American trade retaliation. That would be disastrous, given that our steel industries are quite integrated across the Canada-U.S. border, and given that the steel trade is quite large and balanced between our two countries.

As someone who serves on the all-party steel caucus, I am going to try to work toward a North American solution to the problem of Chinese steel dumping rather than running the risk of Canada falling victim to the Trump administration's efforts to address this quite real and serious problem.

Now, on the topic of steel dumping, this is an issue with Ukraine as well. Ukraine has quite a significant steel industry, but, unfortunately, it does not have the kind of labour and environmental standards that all countries should respect. There is a problem with the dumping of Ukrainian steel as well. A few months ago, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal renewed anti-dumping duties on Ukrainian steel in recognition that the problem persists.

This is an issue that gives me some pause with the Canada-Ukraine trade deal. However, I am still confident in supporting it, because this deal importantly allows Canada to continue with trade remedy policies. This agreement does not impair our ability to apply anti-dumping and countervailing duties when necessary against Ukrainian steel. I think this agreement safeguards our industry and allows the Canadian government to continue to offset unfair competitive advantages achieved in Ukraine by violating internationally recognized labour and environmental standards. That is an important thing.

On the topic of dealing with the Trump administration on trade policy, in a much broader way, Trump has suggested renegotiating NAFTA. This is clearly a threat to Canada in some ways, but it is also an opportunity. I would note that there are aspects of NAFTA that are problematic, that do not work well for Canada, and that we should seek to fix in any potential renegotiation.

I spoke earlier about investor-state provisions and the problems created when we empower foreign investors to directly challenge policies that allegedly deprive them of some potential profit. We have seen a lot of those problems play out under NAFTA. We have the famous AbitibiBowater case. That company shut down its last pulp and paper mill in Newfoundland and Labrador. In response, the provincial government reclaimed water rights that it had given to AbitibiBowater to operate those mills. The company turned around and sued Canada under NAFTA for the loss of those water rights, even though it was not using them anymore to produce pulp and paper in that province.

The former Conservative government ended up paying AbitibiBowater millions of dollars to settle that. Clearly, investor-state provisions are a problem, and clearly chapter 11 is a part of NAFTA that is not working. I think very high on the Canadian agenda in any renegotiation of NAFTA needs to be to remove chapter 11.

We have also had a lot of debates in the House about pipelines, about being able to export Canadian resources to different markets. NAFTA actually restricts that through the proportionality clause. It locks Canada in to making a certain proportion of our energy resources, not just oil and gas, but also electricity, available to the United States. Removing the proportionality clause from NAFTA is another thing that Canada needs to be pushing for in our negotiations with the Trump administration.

A lot of Canadians are fearful of this whole idea of renegotiation of NAFTA. There is a sense that if it does not work out, if Trump tears up NAFTA, then we will not have anything, that our whole trade relationship with the United States will be at risk. Happily, if we get into that eventuality, we still have the original Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, which is a deal that is much more similar to the agreement we are currently debating with Ukraine. It is an agreement that removes tariffs. It is an agreement that gives us tariff-free access to the U.S. market without including these pernicious investor-state provisions.

Given that we can fall back on the original Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, Canada should be quite bold and should push quite hard in renegotiating NAFTA to fix it and remove those elements we do not like, because as I said, the alternative is something much better.

[Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 10th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons the NDP is happy to support this trade agreement, in contrast to the Canada-Europe deal, is that it does not contain investor-state provisions that would allow foreign investors to directly challenge our democratic laws, regulations, and policies through special, secretive commercial tribunals, as opposed to the regular Canadian court system that all other Canadians, and indeed foreigners, would have access to in this country.

I wonder if the member for Calgary Nose Hill could explain to the House why the Conservatives think it is important to include investor-state provisions in CETA.

[Statistics Act, February 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I would agree with the member across the way that the crafting of questions should be left to the independent agency. The agency would not be operating in some sort of vacuum but crafting questions based on what is happening in the country, and what sort of data all of the stakeholders want, including the government. However, the final decision about drafting the questions needs to be made by the agency itself in order to preserve its independence, which is what we are trying to do here today.

[Statistics Act, February 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, indeed I do share those concerns. Statistics Canada had a long-standing advisory board that was much larger and represented virtually every sector of society and every region of the country. Of course there are many benefits to that. In an effort to be as charitable as possible to the government, the idea may be that having a smaller body can be a more effective decision-making group, rather than a large body of appointees where it almost becomes an honorific. The devil here is in the details, and we need to know that the government will actually appoint well-qualified, independent people. Therefore, I think there is every reason to be suspicious that may not happen, and is a reason for us, as opposition MPs, to keep a careful watch on those appointments and that process.

[Statistics Act, February 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, it is a reasonable compromise to say that, although we need to have confidentiality, after a period as long as 92 years it is reasonable to make information and records public. It is extremely unlikely that would compromise the privacy of a living person, so I think that part of the legislation is appropriate. It will help with research and genealogy. Obviously, there are trade-offs that need to be made sometimes between making information available for research and protecting privacy. However, I do think that the 92-year guarantee of confidentiality is a reasonable balance to strike.

[Statistics Act, February 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I was so looking forward to giving a 20-minute speech on this bill. It really pains me to be limited to 10 minutes, but again I appreciate the opportunity to speak.

The government prides itself on evidence-based policy. Statistics Canada is a critically important institution because it provides the evidence for that evidence-based policy. The independence of Statistics Canada is crucial because, without it, we might end up with policy-based evidence; we might end up with Statistics Canada producing information or failing to produce information in response to political directives. Therefore, if we are concerned about having good governance and evidence-based policy, it is really important that we have an independent professional statistics agency such as Statistics Canada. That is why this is an important piece of legislation.

Why is it a timely topic? It is a timely topic because, just in the past few years, we have had two chief statisticians resign in protest of a lack of independence for Statistics Canada.

The first one of these resignations was Munir Sheikh, who resigned in protest of the previous government's very strange decision to eliminate the mandatory long form census. This was a decision that was objected to by almost every sector of society. It was a very odd decision. I do not know if it was an attempt to pander to certain libertarian elements, but there was never a big groundswell of Canadians who objected to having to fill out the census. It was once every decade in terms of the full census; or once every five years, if we include the partial census. Therefore, it was a very odd decision, and the chief statistician resigned to protest it.

We actually just had an interesting discussion in this House about the necessity for a mandatory long form census. My colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa said we do not actually need to make it mandatory because we can just rely on sampling and proper sampling techniques. However, in order to design the sample, they need to know what the whole population is. In order to know that the sample is representative, they have to at some point have done a census of the entire population. Therefore a mandatory complete census is really the necessary foundation for all of the good sampling work that my colleague was mentioning. He used the analogy of this Parliament, and he stated that if we asked all 338 MPs to respond to something, that would not be a sample; that would be the entire population. That is true enough.

However, let us try to imagine constructing a representative sample of the House of Commons. In order to do that, we would need to know something about the whole population. For example, we would need to know how many MPs are in each party caucus if we wanted our sample to have the right number of people from each party. We would need to know how many seats there are from each province in order to make sure our sample was regionally representative. Just using that rudimentary analogy, it is easy to see that people can do a lot of good research and statistical work based on sampling, but in order to construct those samples, they do periodically need to have some census of the entire population. That is why almost all advanced industrialized countries have these mandatory census practices periodically. It is a common-sense thing, and we are glad to have it back in Canada, although certainly, as some of my colleagues have pointed out, this legislation falls somewhat short in terms of making it truly mandatory.

The second chief statistician who resigned was Wayne Smith. He resigned quite recently, just in the past few months, to protest the way in which Statistics Canada's arrangement with Shared Services Canada had impaired the agency's independence. This is the real motivation for this bill being brought before the House.

The government, in response to this controversy of Wayne Smith's resignation, wants to be able to say that it is doing something to protect the independence of Statistics Canada, that it is taking action and dealing with the problem.

The odd thing is that this bill does not say anything about Statistics Canada's relationship with Shared Services Canada. It does not propose any sort of alternative model for Statistics Canada to get the IT services on which its important work depends.

While in terms of chronology and perhaps in terms of political positioning, the bill is a response to Mr. Smith's resignation, the content of the bill actually would not do anything to address the problems that motivated Mr. Smith's resignation.

We in the NDP are going to support this bill in order to get it before committee so we can try to make some improvements to it and so we can perhaps address some of these problems. However, it is important to note that in its current form this legislation would fall far short of dealing with what precipitated this crisis in Statistics Canada.

It is worth talking a bit about Shared Services Canada. This was really an attempt by the previous Conservative government to cut corners and to cut costs a bit and to say that, because it had IT services in many different departments and agencies, it would be more efficient to centralize them into one IT agency. There is some logic to that. One can imagine how it might have worked, but as with so many of these efforts in the federal government to centralize functions between departments and agencies, there were huge problems in the implementation and in the execution.

One issue with Shared Services Canada is that all departments and agencies were ordered to transfer their IT staff to the new Shared Services Canada, which made sense. However, Shared Services Canada needs more than IT professionals. It needs administrative assistants. It needs financial people. It needs other types of managers. The way those people were put in place was that all the other departments and agencies were told that they needed to send x number of administrative assistants, x number of accountants, etc., to Shared Services Canada.

What did the managers in these other departments and agencies do? Did they send their best and most reliable employees away? No, they used it as an opportunity to perhaps send people whom they were trying to remove from their organizations anyway. In that sense, Shared Services Canada was really set up to fail through bad implementation and bad execution.

However, even if we are able to fix Shared Services Canada and get it functioning properly, there is still a huge problem with making Statistics Canada totally reliant on this other entity. By definition, that impinges upon the independence of Statistics Canada. In setting up Shared Services Canada, the government did recognize that there were some agencies in government that were so sensitive they had to have control of their own IT. This Parliament that we are in right now is an example of that. Other countries such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand also manage to exempt their statistical agencies from their centralized government-wide IT structures.

Mr. Smith has a valid point in suggesting that Statistics Canada could be exempt from Shared Services Canada, and I am really hoping that is something we can look at in committee after passing the bill in the current reading.

There is definitely room to consider other arrangements. Statistics Canada maybe could have its own IT capacity. Failing that, if we do want Statistics Canada to work with Shared Services Canada, maybe Statistics Canada could at least have the option of sometimes going to other suppliers if Shared Services Canada cannot provide the required support. However, one way or another, we need to find a way to give Statistics Canada the kind of technical support and the kind of IT infrastructure it needs to do this critically important research and to provide this critically important information and evidence. I am disappointed that the bill we are considering today really fails to address that problem at all.

[Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 6th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Thornhill presented the European Union as a massive export market for Canada. However, in 2015, Canada sold only $22 billion of exports to the EU, if we exclude the United Kingdom, which is in the process of leaving that organization. Meanwhile, we imported $52 billion worth of merchandise from what is left of the European Union.

If we were to amplify those trade flows on a bilateral basis, we would have an even larger trade deficit, hence an even greater loss of Canadian jobs. Therefore, I wonder if the member for Thornhill is relying on some sort of Tom Brady-style comeback to overturn this trade deficit.

[Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement Implementation Act, February 6th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, my colleague said that CETA would create 80,000 jobs, and I would like to question that statistic. My understanding is that it is based on a study that assumed full employment, and therefore that CETA would not create any jobs or affect employment either way. Based on these unrealistic assumptions, it came up with a dollar value of increases in trade and then worked back from that to say that this was equivalent to 80,000 jobs.

Therefore, would my colleague withdraw this claim of 80,000 jobs, or does he have another explanation as to how he arrived at it?