James Moore

[Private Members' Business, May 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, backbench government and opposition MPs have few legislative tools at our disposal to raise issues of private or local concern here on the national stage.

One legislative mechanism we do have is the ability to draft private members' bills and motions to be drawn by a lottery and brought to the House.

By pure luck, my first ever private member's bill, to take the GST off the repairs of leaky condos in British Columbia, was drawn.

Unfortunately my one legislative avenue to have this issue of dominant importance in my constituency brought to the House for a vote will not happen. Like dozens of other private members' bills and motions, it will see the light of day in this House for 60 short minutes and die on the order paper.

All private members' bills and motions should be deemed automatically votable unless and only if the bill's sponsor deems it otherwise. There are no credible arguments for this to not be the case.

Each and every one of our constituents, the 30 million Canadians who we collectively represent, deserves an open and democratic system that respects their concerns first and treats those concerns with respect. Anything short of this is a defamation of this place and of the nature of true democracy that all Canadians deserve.

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I compliment my colleague for his excellent speech on the subject. It is interesting to listen to people from different political parties speak to the subject. However the detractors of free trade keep trotting out Ethyl Corporation and Metalclad as examples of chapter 11 without any knowledge or thorough understanding of it. They just say the corporation sued and the corporation won, but there seems to be no deeper understanding of the issue than that. However that is not the basis of my question.

I wanted the hon. member to comment on the assumption which has been spun that there is swelling support of young people against free trade. I am the youngest member of the House. I am speaking uniquely for myself, unlike other young people who are active in politics and who claim to speak for all young people.

Members of my family have left Canada because of high taxes and lack of opportunity. They came from British Columbia where the NDP governs. They decided that high taxes and shutting off trade was not the way of the future.

I also want to speak to the issue of civil society. We have heard this term trotted out by Maude Barlow and her ilk, that they represent the burgeoning group of civil society. They say that those who oppose free trade are examples of civil society.

Any serious political scientist who understands the nature and root of the ethic of civil society, where it comes from in communitarianism, knows for a fact that the term civil society is being hijacked by the radical left.

Civil society is organic people coming together and voluntarily deciding that their ideas have a common cause through community instinct. It is not the well informed and badly intentioned leading the badly informed and well intentioned, which is precisely what happened in Quebec City.

My question is for the member for Kelowna. What does he think of the hijacking of people by the radical left that claims to speak for all young Canadians, the hijacking of the good ethic of communitarianism and real civil society that represents people?

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, this speaks precisely to the comment I made earlier. If this is an issue of national sovereignty, if the member wants to debate the issue, and if the member wants to talk about the impact of NAFTA's chapter 11, why is he asking us who our trade critic is?

We have had a whole list of speakers. The member for Lethbridge has spoken. The member for Kootenay—Columbia, with whom I am sharing my time, will be speaking in a minute as well. We have consistently spoken up on this issue and consistently spoken for free trade.

I suggest to the member for Burnaby—Douglas that he ought to have his platform thoroughly ironed out with his provincial party and spend a little more time analyzing free trade agreements such as the Canada foreign investment protection agreement with Croatia. Members of his party have said nothing about it in the House. They are totally negligent of their responsibilities to bash capitalism. If he spent more time studying free trade rather than—

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

The member for Burnaby—Douglas is heckling and that is fine. I will never forget the hon. member for Burnaby—Douglas at the battle in Seattle. Some of the protestors there had about as much credibility as a 13 year old quote.

My favourite scene from the riots is a protester, vehemently opposed to globalization and integration of nations, who picked up a rock, smashed the front window of a Radio Shack store and stole a satellite dish. Typical.

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard those predictions for centuries. Mr. Yeutter is probably not laughing today, 13 years later. Canada has an enormous trade surplus with the United States. I do not think he would be laughing about that now.

I suggest, frankly, that when members of the fourth party want credibility on the subject they regurgitate quotes that are a little younger than 13 years old.

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I am reluctant to judge people's motives but they do seem suspect. If one feels passionately about an issue then one has a responsibility to bring it to the fore.

Perhaps the members of the fourth party we have heard here today have talked about the issue at the constituency level. The leader of the NDP did not bring it up in the leaders' debate. It was not raised in my constituency because the NDP in British Columbia are free traders. If federal NDP candidates in British Columbia stood and said that they were opposed to free trade, they would be contradicting 85% of their base supporters who put up lawn signs, raise money and so on. Perhaps that answers part of the member's question.

However, it is suspect that they feel passionately about the issue but did not raise it. They say the issue is central to the essence of what it is to be Canadian and will have a profound impact on our sovereignty. They knew the issue was coming down the pike and yet they said nothing. The member opposite has a point. Why did they not raise the issue? That is a good question. Perhaps we will hear an answer from members of the fourth party.

[Supply, May 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we routinely hear calls from the left in Canada denouncing NAFTA's chapter 11, the World Trade Organization and free trade in general. Unfortunately their pedestrian understanding of trade matters undermines the rights of union workers whose interests they claim to represent.

Had the NDP view prevailed during the FTA debate in 1988, auto workers would have been in deep trouble when the WTO struck down the longstanding Canada-U.S. auto pact. That decision alone could have wiped out union jobs in towns like Windsor, Oakville, Oshawa and Sainte-Therese.

However the FTA agreement, an agreement the left so strongly denounces, protected those jobs and established free market rules that allowed auto exports to the U.S. to grow by 15%. That has increased the opportunities, wealth and living standards of thousands of Canadian auto workers.

If members of the radical left in Canada want to be taken seriously and not labelled hypocrites, they should adopt the same standards of openness, democracy and transparency they demand from others. If they want open door free-for-alls when Canada negotiates bilateral or multilateral trade deals they should be willing to live by the same standards.

In fact they should lead by example. They should demonstrate to Canadians how their nirvana of openness would work in practice. They should open up all future union-management contract negotiations to public scrutiny. They should answer questions from citizens who are concerned about the impact of proposed labour deals on the environment, culture, the economy and society at large. They should discuss the impact of such deals on the cost of labour, on post-secondary education and on the way we all feel about one another. The media would of course be invited to these free-for-alls.

Fortunately no serious economist, social scientist, commentator or politician believes such a system could work. More important, no serious unionists or business leaders would impose such a regime of unreasonable checks on their own behaviour. They understand that there is a place for consultation and closed door negotiations and then a place for the rank and file to vote on a final agreement. That is the approach that the Canadian Alliance and I support, and that is exactly what needs to happen.

When I hear that the fourth party is opposed to the investor state provisions in NAFTA's chapter 11, I cannot help but wonder what they stand for and, more important, where they have been for the past few years. Consider the following paragraph:

The investor affected shall have a right, under the law of the Contracting Party making the expropriation, to prompt review, by a judicial or other independent authority of that Party, of its case and of the valuation of its investment or returns in accordance with the principles set out in this Article.

The text I just read is not from NAFTA's chapter 11. It is article 8, paragraph 2 of the Canada-Egypt foreign investment protection agreement. It is also article 8, paragraph 2 of the Canada-Philippines foreign investment protection agreement and article 8, paragraph 2 of the Canada-Venezuela foreign investment protection Agreement.

It could also have been taken from similar foreign investment protection agreements, or FIPAs, that Canada is negotiating with a growing list of countries from Armenia to Uruguay. It could just as easily have been taken from article 8, paragraph 2 of the Canada-Croatia foreign investment protection agreement. That agreement went into effect on January 30 of this year and the NDP does not even appear to have noticed. It is still fighting battles from 1988.

The NDP seems unconcerned that all these agreements have clauses allowing investors to submit disputes with signatory states to arbitration by the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, an international ad hoc arbitration tribunal established under the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law.

Let me say that again. A foreign investment protection agreement with Croatia, which features investor state provisions virtually identical to NAFTA's chapter 11, went into effect on January 30 of this year and the far left has said nothing. It seems the radical left follows trade issues about as carefully as New Zealanders follow hockey.

I used to play hockey. If I am in a bar and people with a New Zealand accent tell me it is great that the Canadian team scored three touchdowns against Italy at the world hockey championships, I will thank them for their support but will likely not take their advice on next year's hockey pool. So it is with the fourth party in the House when it comes to trade policy. Its members seem to know as much about world trade as I do about yodelling.

The NDP's principal argument against chapter 11 is that it limits the government's ability to protect our environment and sovereignty in the same way that the charter of rights initially compelled Canadian police forces to adapt to the country's newly enshrined citizens rights.

Canada's international trade agreements will require governments to think smarter and more consistently in making public policy decisions. Chapter 11 of NAFTA is based on five basic principles. The first is transparency. Investors have a right to know what the law is and governments cannot capriciously change rules midstream.

The second is national treatment. We must treat investors from other countries the same way we treat Canadian investors, provided they do the same for us. In other words, we cannot stop Wal-Mart from building a big box store unless we are prepared to apply the same rules to Zellers, Canadian Tire or Rona.

The third is protection of investors. We cannot take property without offering compensation, and a property owner has the right to ask an independent body to determine if the compensation is fair.

The fourth is quick and fair settlement of disputes. Parties should get a quick and impartial decision.

The fifth is reciprocity. Canadian companies doing business abroad should be treated the same way we treat foreign companies here.

People may why ask they did not hear about investor state rights until recently. It is likely because the five principles I just listed are so basic to Canada and to our major trading partners that there was never any need to write them down.

It should come as no surprise that we are not negotiating foreign investment protection agreements with the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Taiwan or Australia. Those countries have long respected the five principles and thus there is no need for a formal agreement.

Every case in which we have included NAFTA chapter 11 type language has extended Canada's notion of an independent judiciary to less progressive states in regions like eastern Europe and Latin America.

Most lawyers will say that for foreign companies doing business in Canada NAFTA chapter 11 changes almost nothing. The left jumps up and down hysterically about the Ethyl Corporation case yet fails to point out that Canada's supreme court would probably have reached the same decision regardless of chapter 11.

Let us consider point 13 from the Ethyl Corporation's statement of claim. The MMT act does not prohibit the manufacture or use of MMT in Canada. It merely requires that all MMT sold in Canadian unleaded gasoline is 100% Canadian. A domestic manufacturer of MMT can manufacture and distribute MMT for use in unleaded gasoline entirely within a province and not violate the MMT act.

If the Ethyl Corporation wanted to maintain its presence in the Canadian octane enhancement market it would be required to build an MMT manufacturing, blending and storage facility in each province.

The left would have us believe that the Ethyl case proves that chapter 11 prevents us from protecting the environment. That is not so. If the federal government had banned outright the use of MMT in Canada, regardless of where it was made, the Ethyl Corporation would not have been able to use the discrimination clause which was so central to its case.

Let us think about this. Let us suppose the city of Ottawa decided that pizza contained a cancer causing ingredient and then used those health concerns to support a law prohibiting anyone from bringing pizza to Ottawa from Hull. If the city of Ottawa did not force its own pizza restaurants and vendors to close, the supreme court would probably find discrimination and force it to back down, repeal the law, award compensation and find another mechanism for banning the dangerous food. However it would not deny it the capacity to ban what is dangerous. It is the same with MMT.

NAFTA chapter 11 is nothing more or less than what has been the status quo in Canada since we adopted the British legal system before Confederation. By putting such language into NAFTA and into foreign investment protection agreements, we are simply asking other countries to give our companies and investors the same respect we have long given companies and investors, both Canadian and foreign, here in Canada.

[Elections, April 30th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, on Saturday, B.C. Liberal leader Gordon Campbell promised that if he were elected premier in B.C.'s election, the next election in B.C. would be on May 17, 2005. Knowing when the election will be allows enhanced accountability and avoids wasting millions of dollars like the government chose to do.

Why is the idea of fixed election dates so difficult for the Prime Minister to understand when his B.C. Liberal colleagues get it perfectly well?

[Elections, April 30th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, today's Ottawa Citizen informs us that the Prime Minister's decision to call an early election last year right in the middle of a scheduled team Canada trip to China cost Canadian taxpayers $4.1 million in cancellation fees.

In addition to needlessly wasting taxpayer money, a clear message was sent both to China and to Canada's business community that a campaign to keep the Liberals in power on a campaign about nothing was more important than exports to China.

Both of Canada's NAFTA partners have fixed election dates and avoid these types of problems. Why will the Liberals not implement the same policy here?

[Tobacco Tax Amendments Act, 2001, April 27th, 2001]

The point is taken, Madam Speaker. However the member knows that in the United States, just as in Canada, the lion's share of cigarette costs is taxation. In the United States, therefore, as we see with as Michigan, New York, North Dakota and Washington, cigarette prices vary from state to state. This puts an increased obligation on Canada to keep smuggling out of the country, and we must fulfil that responsibility.

As the member knows, in places like Akwesasne we have a tremendously complex border with differing police jurisdictions and the government must make sure it sufficiently guards that border.

I will also note that one cause of cigarette smuggling is the increase in price that results from aggressive taxation policies designed to discourage smoking.

In Great Britain, for example, the government has decided to implement, on an interim basis and with a sunset clause, a 5% increase in cigarettes taxes each year. The U.K. government argues that it is best if such increases are done cyclically, as seen with Canada's increase of 1993, its drop of 1994, its increases of 1996 and 1998, and its expected increase of 2001. If such tax increases are too great or too sudden they will cause a surge in the black market.

The government in Westminster has implemented a gradual increase in taxation. There is no instant spurring of the cost of cigarettes and therefore no spurring of black market or smuggling activity. That is the sort of legislation the Canadian government should keep in mind if it is to continue down the path of increasing cigarette taxes to reduce consumption.