Mr. Speaker, I want to say very clearly at the outset that the Bloc Québécois is not in favour of Bill C-2, which the government tabled in the House today.
We do not like this bill any more than we liked it in the last session, despite the amendment, or the supposed amendment, that the Liberals are going to propose at the Standing Committee on International Trade. We fail to see how we could possibly be in favour of an amendment like that. It will leave the two parties involved in control and will mean that the governments of Canada and Colombia will be both judge and jury in evaluating respect for human rights. It does not make sense.
I am very familiar with the entire issue and with the previous positions of the Liberal Party, and I really cannot understand what they are doing now. Their previous position was to protect and respect human rights in Colombia. But now they have gone off in another direction.
Canada initiated discussions in 2002 with the Andean countries of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia about a possible free trade agreement.
Canada negotiated bilateral agreements with Colombia and Peru over the space of a few years. On June 7, 2008, Canada and Colombia announced they had completed their negotiations, and on November 21, they signed the free trade agreement.
We looked for the main reason why the Conservative government would sign this agreement regardless of the major objections that were raised.
We noted that the agreement does not really help trade. The trade issue is a red herring, because the agreement is actually about investment. It is obvious that an agreement like this is intended to promote investment.
It has a chapter on protecting investments that will make life easier for Canadian investors in Colombia, especially in the mining sector.
When it comes to trade, Colombia is only the fifth-largest market for Canadian exports to Latin America and the Caribbean and the seventh-largest source of Canadian imports from that region.
It is obvious that Canada has trading partners in this region that are a lot more important than Colombia. Concluding an agreement with Colombia, therefore, has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons always used to justify a free trade agreement. Far from it.
Canada’s trade with the other countries of Latin America has tended to increase over the last few years, meaning that the proportion of our trade with Colombia has fallen.
The bulk of Canadian investment in Colombia is, as I just mentioned, in the mining sector.
What use then is a free trade agreement? It does not make sense.
We have statistics on the amount of trade between Colombia and Canada. It is hard to understand why the Conservative government is so attached to this agreement. When two countries want to negotiate and sign a free trade agreement, it is usually because they are especially strong trading partners and the trade flows between them are particularly heavy.
When the value of trade is high, abolishing trade barriers becomes more interesting because it facilitates further trade.
Trade with the market we are talking about is limited. We do trade with Colombia, as with all countries, but we fail to see what kind of business benefits Quebec and Canada could find in this agreement. As I said before, this agreement is all about stimulating investments, and not so much about stimulating trade.
In the last few years, Canada signed investment protection agreements but the one that would bind Canada and Colombia has been ill conceived. All these agreements contain clauses that enable foreign investors to sue the local government if it takes measures that reduce the return on their investment. Foreign investments have been growing exponentially.
In order to create a predictable environment and ensure that a foreign investor does not end up losing his assets without compensation in the event of nationalization, for example, countries sign agreements to protect investments. This is perfectly normal and the Bloc Quebecois approves such agreements. In fact, the North American Free Trade Agreement includes a chapter on investment protection.
However, NAFTA's chapter 11 marked the beginning of a negative trend. The provisions were not well structured and were highly criticized. For example, as soon as some environment protection legislation affects the returns of a foreign investor, the government is open to massive lawsuits.
Still, over the years, the Government of Canada has signed a number of bilateral agreements modelled on NAFTA's chapter 11. There was so much criticism that even the Liberals, who just gave their support to an agreement that they condemned for many legitimate reasons, stopped signing such agreements.
Under the Conservatives, Ottawa is now on the offence and is negotiating all kinds of agreements like this one. In this case, the government is handing responsibility for deciding what is in the best interest of the people over to multinationals. They are giving up. They are saying that since such an agreement is good for investments, the multinationals can determine whether displacing thousands of people is acceptable.
The Bloc Québécois opposes the bill to implement the free trade agreement with Colombia because it contains clauses based on chapter 11 of NAFTA. Our party is asking the government to revert to the old treaty formula, which did not give multinationals control at the expense of the common good.
The bill will be referred to committee and we will see if it can be amended.
I would also like to talk about corporate social responsibility. In recent years, Colombia has had one of the worst records in terms of human rights and corporate social responsibility. Colombian exports tend to come from rural regions in the most remote parts of the country. These regions have valuable natural resources, but they are also the most violent regions.
Allowing these investments will only aggravate the problem.
Coming back to the rural regions I mentioned earlier, these regions have experienced 87% of all forced population displacements, 82% of all human rights and international humanitarian law abuses, and 83% of all union leader assassinations.
The measures allowed by the free trade agreement with Colombia will only make this situation even worse. The agreement will increase the presence of foreign investors, especially multinationals and mining companies.
I asked the minister a question a moment ago. We are not necessarily opposed to free trade agreements. There may be some very good free trade agreements, just as there may be bad ones. But we do not believe this one can be a good agreement in trade terms. The volume of trade is so low that we do not see how an agreement will change things. This agreement will encourage investment, however. Generally, when one country signs a free trade agreement with another country, the economies of the two countries are similar. The reason is very simple: measures to protect investment can slow the development of poorer countries because they give corporations the power to take the government to court if it makes laws or regulations that reduce the return on investments. If we look at the socio-economic data, it is readily apparent that Canada and Colombia are very different.
The fact that Colombia is a country where enormous poverty prevails cannot be ignored. In 2006, 47% of the population was living below the poverty line, and 12% of the population was living in abject poverty. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, poverty hits hardest in rural areas. In 2006, 68% of the population was living in poverty, and this is a serious problem. A government often has to adopt measures to get its country out of poverty and develop it. Such measures can take the form of labour, environmental or health legislation or nationalization of certain economic sectors. So this kind of protection for investments jeopardizes the ability of the Colombian government to effectively combat poverty. Essentially, the Government of Colombia has to continue fighting poverty, but with a chapter that provides for protecting foreign investments. This agreement ties its hands, and that will prevent it from making progress, even if it has good intentions to reduce violence in Colombia. In Colombia, there are still paramilitary groups that are not controlled by the government. In my view, it is unacceptable for a government or a democracy like Canada to sign an agreement like this. Colombia is a democratic country, but it is a democratic country that is unable to take action against human rights violations. Personally, I think it is a democracy that cannot be seen as having the same characteristics as other democracies on the planet.
Colombia has one of the worst track records in the world when it comes to human rights, and certainly the worst in Latin America. In order to improve the human rights situation in the world, governments often use the carrot and the stick. They support efforts toward greater respect for human rights and they reserve the right to withdraw certain benefits if there is backsliding. By signing this agreement, Canada will be giving up any ability to bring pressure to bear. Let us hope that some Liberal members will recall their earlier position. Canada will be giving up any means of bringing pressure to bear against a human rights situation that is unacceptable.
The Conservatives say over and over that the human rights situation in Colombia has greatly improved. It may be less catastrophic than it was a few years ago, but it is still very far from ideal.
Canada’s former ambassador to Colombia, Mathew Levin, said basically the same thing in speaking of the Colombian economy: “The [Canadian] government knows that the Colombian reality is not ideal. There is poverty, violence, lack of access to services”.
I want to provide just one statistic. Since 1986, 2,690 trade unionists have been murdered. Although these murders declined somewhat after 2001, they have increased since 2007. According to Mariano José Guerra, the regional president of the National Federation of Public Sector Workers in Colombia, “thousands of people have disappeared and the persecution of unions continues”.
In view of all these facts, we cannot understand why the Conservative government is so intent on concluding this agreement. With all the population displacement we see, we wonder as well why the Liberal Party is very likely to support the agreement. That is totally unacceptable.
