Libby Davies

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 15th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, here again is a very good example of what is buried within the budget implement bill. The whole issue of the public broadcaster and funding for the arts. I know many of us are actually part of the arts caucus that reflects members from different parties, but we are very concerned about the state of arts and culture in Canada.

The member is right to point out that buried in this document there are a few lines that somehow say that we should not worry, that everything is okay, but the reality is that our public broadcaster, as well as our cultural institutions, have suffered enormously. We should know that an investment in the arts and culture and in artists is very beneficial to society as a whole in terms of not only cultural benefits, but also in economic benefits.

This idea that within the bill everything is okay for arts and culture is just another fraud that is being put through in this budget implementation bill.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 15th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I would agree. What on earth does the privatization and deregulation of Canada Post have to do with a budget bill? However, it is stuck right in the bill. Maybe the Conservatives were hoping that no one would notice, but it was pretty glaring that it was there and of course its impact will be enormous, particularly on smaller communities.

Many of us in the House, and I know our colleagues in the Bloc Québécois share this as well, that smaller and rural communities have suffered tremendously from cutbacks at Canada Post. It used to be that we had good service but now many of the postal outlets and offices have been removed. People have to rely on supermailboxes and so the service in rural Canada has seriously deteriorated.

I live in an urban environment so I am not so familiar with those changes, but I know my other colleagues have raised that in the House. The Conservatives are trying to use this Trojan Horse approach and move this about Canada Post through a budget bill. On those grounds alone we should be rejecting the bill and calling it for what it is. It is really fraudulent that they would try to do it in this way in a budget bill.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 15th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-9, the budget implementation bill. I want to begin my remarks by commenting on the enormity of this bill. It is 872 pages long and has 24 different parts.

When one goes through the bill, whether one goes through the summary or starts looking at the bill in its totality, one can see immediately that the Conservative government has decided to use this bill as a cover for all kinds of very negative and bad public policy initiatives. We are certainly aware of that and this is one of the reasons it is very important that debate take place on Bill C-9.

I would add to the comments made by my colleagues that it is very ironic that Conservative members are choosing not to debate this bill, because it is simply enormous when one considers what is covered in it. We did hear the budget speech and we had the budget itself, but this budget implementation bill goes far beyond what was contained in the budget. It is using itself as a cover for all kinds of draconian measures. I will mention a couple.

Environmental assessment is a very important issue in terms of ensuring that the public interest is represented in dealing with environmental issues. Why is it in a budget implementation bill that the minister will now have all kinds of discretion to dictate the scope of environmental assessments of any of the projects to be reviewed? Why would it be that federally funded infrastructure projects can now be exempted from environmental assessment?

These are very serious questions which in and of themselves should be debated separately through legislation in a debate in the House, yet they have been slipped into Bill C-9, the budget implementation act. We are very concerned about that. We are very disturbed that the government is yet again using these kinds of means to try and slip important matters through the House.

The Conservatives did it a few years ago with Bill C-50, when they brought in all kinds of very substantive changes to the Citizenship and Immigration Act. They used a budget bill to do that. We see the same in this bill with Canada Post. We know that the Conservatives have tried to move a bill through the House which in effect would privatize aspects of Canada Post and affect the jobs and services that are provided by that crown corporation and federal agency.

We have held up that bill. We prevented it from coming forward. What is the response? Yet again, the Conservatives are trying to slip it through in the budget implementation bill. I am actually surprised that they did not try to include the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement and sneak that one through, too, because we have been holding that one up.

I want to reserve the rest of my comments for issues pertaining to what I think are very serious in my community and how this budget implementation bill does not deal with them.

I represent the riding of Vancouver East. It is a wonderful riding, full of activists and great neighbourhoods, and yet right now in the city of Vancouver there is a crisis taking place. The seven Vancouver homeless emergency action team shelters are slated to close by April 30.

Those shelters have been providing a safe, warm, appropriate place for people to go where there is a laundry facility, food, good management and care for about 600 people a night. There was a lot of suspicion that these shelters were put up just for the Olympics. Hundreds of thousands of people were in our city for the Olympics. We were all aware that we had a serious homelessness and housing affordability crisis in our city. These shelters were opened and they have provided support to people. That has been very important. Now they are going to close.

In fact, there has been a very public conflict going on between the province of B.C. and the city of Vancouver as to what will happen with these shelters. What is remarkable to me is that the federal government has not said one word. There is nothing about the federal homelessness partnering strategy and that maybe it could provide some assistance with these shelters now slated to be closed and the fact that there will be hundreds of people out on the street. It is just so staggering to understand what is taking place.

We are dealing with issues in my community that are deeply systemic. This housing crisis has gone on for two decades. It started with the former Liberal government that eliminated all of the housing programs. My Bill C-304 would try to get the federal government back into housing by working with the provinces, municipalities, first nations and civil society.

This crisis is incredible to me. People are out on the street in our city right now and more people will be out on the street because these shelters are going to close down.

The annual homeless count that was done on March 23 showed that the number of homeless people in Vancouver had increased 12% from 2008 from 1,576 people to 1,762 people. Those are numbers but we also need to think about this in terms of individual people. We need to think about the impact on people's lives when they do not know where they will go each night, do not have access to proper food, do not have a decent income, do not have proper shelter assistance to keep out of the cold and wet weather and do not have access to laundry facilities. These figures are staggering.

The only good news, if there is any good news, is that 1,300 of those 1,700 homeless people were in shelters. In fact, the number of people in shelters has increased, which is good, but, as I said before, these shelters will be closing.

I have to question the government with this budget implementation bill that is nearly 900 pages long as to why there is nothing in the budget that will help the City of Vancouver deal with this crisis as it tries to cope with the costs. It costs the city about $7 million to keep these shelters open when the federal government could be doing that.

The City of Vancouver, like other municipalities, relies on the property tax base. It does the best it can in stretching every single dollar. It has gone more than its distance and more than its responsibility in ensuring that these shelters are operating. It did get some assistance from the provincial government but most of that is now coming to an end.

This raises a very stark contrast. On the one hand, we see a budget that continues with outrageous tax breaks to corporations in the billions of dollars, robbing the public purse of desperately needed revenue, and on the other hand, we see communities, like the Downtown Eastside and other communities across the country, where people are destitute on the street and do not know where they will go each night.

A budget is about disclosing the real priorities and the real objectives of a government. We have had so much emphasis and focus on crime bills and little boutique bills. We have had so much overemphasis on law enforcement and tough on crime measures that will solve every problem we have, but we have deeply systemic and complex social issues in the urban environment, whether it is a lack of funds for public transit, lack of funds for housing or lack of funds for child care. People are literally struggling each month to get by.

The plight of homeless people is quite shocking but it affects a broader segment of society too. I know lots of working folks where both parents are working and making minimum wage or maybe a bit more and they are struggling to keep up with exorbitant child care costs, even if they can get into child care.

In addressing Bill C-9, the budget implementation act, I want to put it right out there that this is an outrage and a shame in terms of what the government has not done to address some of these ongoing and deeply systemic issues in our country. The gap is growing between wealth and poverty. More Canadians are falling into an environment where they cannot make ends meet.

We saw a wonder film the other night Poor no More that was premiered here on Parliament Hill hosted by Mary Walsh that showed so well in a very articulate way what is taking place for the working poor. These are people who are working, many of whom are getting a minimum wage. It showed how people are struggling and are actually living below the poverty line.

This is a bad budget implementation bill because it does not deal with what needs to be dealt with in my community and other communities. I hope that we can convince other members of the House not to support it.

[Points of Order, April 15th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to address some of the points raised by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons relating to an amendment made in the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities to Bill C-304, An Act to ensure secure, adequate, accessible and affordable housing for Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, I will refer to a ruling that you made on January 29, 2008, referring to a committee amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act then before the House. In that ruling, you said:

In essence, what we are dealing with is the distinction between the principle of the bill and its scope. The principle refers to the purpose or objective of a bill, while the scope refers to its legislative scheme or the mechanisms that will give effect to the principle, purpose or objective of a bill.

In Bill C-304, the parliamentary secretary himself stated in his argument on April 1 that the purpose of this bill was to “require the development of a national housing strategy” by having the minister “consult all provincial and territorial ministers on the development of such a strategy”. He then said that the rules explain that amendments cannot be outside the scope or principle of the bill as passed at second reading, a rule with which we are all familiar.

I would submit that while the parliamentary secretary did give an accurate description of the principle and the scope of this bill, the principle is to develop a strategy and the scope or the mechanism is to do that through consultations. The key to the government's argument seems to prejudge what the results of these consultations will be.

The amendment in question is a permissive, not mandatory, amendment. It would give the minister an ability to achieve the principle of the bill, a national housing strategy, by refining the scope in terms of consultation to include an option that has been in place in other social policy strategies throughout Canadian history. Therefore, I would submit that the amendment does not change the scope or purpose of the bill but rather seeks to clarify it.

I believe that the committee chair's opinion on the principle of this bill may have been well-intentioned but the committee members were also correct when they decided that the amendment to allow the minister an option to respond to consultations, up to and including an opt-out for Quebec, was within the scope of possible consultations that are required to allow the minister to meet the principle of the bill, which is to develop a national housing strategy.

This option provided in the amendment is a reasonable one and one which is as old as Canada, the option to treat different parts of our country as different and unique.

The House recently passed a motion to define Quebec as a nation within our nation. We have the Canada pension plan and the national child benefit, two well-functioning national programs that Quebec has chosen not to participate in but instead to provide similar services. Quebec has opted out of the Canada student loans program since 1964 and recently received its transfer of approximately $125 million from the federal government in support of student financial assistance programs for the most recent academic year.

To go back further, the Liberal government's 2004 action plan on health exempted Quebec from the criteria and accountability set up for all other provinces and territories while guaranteeing full health transfer payments.

A further example is Canada's Social Union Framework Agreement of 2002, which was a pan-Canadian approach to the reform of Canada's health and social policy systems to which all provinces were signatories except Quebec. The Canada-Quebec accord on immigration allows Quebec to establish its own immigration requirements, distinct from the rest of Canada.

Governments for years, as former prime minister Paul Martin noted, have recognized “Quebec's unique place within the Federation”. It is reasonable that members of Parliament understand that any national strategy must reflect Quebec's right to protect its unique nature through the delivery of certain programs.

The amendment in question today does not alter the nature of the bill but clarifies this right. The government argued that, because an amendment to exclude Quebec from Bill S-3 was inadmissible, this amendment on Bill C-304 should also be inadmissible.

However, these two bills are not comparable. Providing the option for Quebec to opt out of a consultation process as outlined in Bill C-304 does not have the same effect on the act as the exclusion of Quebec does from Bill S-3, which was an act affecting the duties of every federal institution in Canada by enhancing the enforceability of the Government of Canada's obligations and of part 7 of the Official Languages Act.

It is also relevant that the 2005 ruling was not challenged by the majority of the committee members as necessary to the bill, as was the case of the amendment to Bill C-304. The aim of Bill C-304 is to ensure the delivery of the right to adequate housing.

Quebec is in the unique circumstance of having ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recognizing the right to adequate housing, and currently meets many of the objectives outlined in Bill C-304.

Therefore, as this House stated when it defined Quebec as a nation within a nation, the principle of this bill being a national housing strategy should naturally reflect Parliament's definition of our nation, which is that it can include an asymmetrical form of federalism without changing the principle of being a united Canada.

Quebec has an existing agreement in place with the federal government giving Quebec jurisdiction over the development and delivery of its housing programs, clarifying that Quebec may participate in the process of establishing a national housing strategy, as was the case before the adoption of the amendment. It will only serve to enhance Quebec's potential willingness to participate in the process set out in Bill C-304.

Therefore in closing, I submit that the amendment made in committee is permissive and not mandatory. It only clarifies in nature an acknowledgement of our understanding of a nation within the scope and consistent with the principle of Bill C-304.

I further submit that this is a rare case when the chair's decision on the scope is misplaced and the members of the committee were correct in allowing this amendment to stand.

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will take this into consideration and support the committee members who agree that this amendment does have its rightful place in Bill C-304.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I want to know whether Healing Our Spirit BC Aboriginal HIV/AIDS Society in east Vancouver, will be able to continue its work. That is as real as it is. It is doing incredible work. It is working with people. It has the expertise, the programs and the support in the community. However, as of tomorrow, it will be unable to do that work.

I know this issue is not going to go away. I know the member knows that and we will continue to raise it. However, there is an opportunity here for the government to rethink its position, do the right thing and ensure that the mandate, funding and work of this foundation continues.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, that was not really a question. It was a comment. I guess the question I have is this. What will come of it? That is what is going to be left hanging in this room tonight as we approach midnight.

We have had some fine talk. The member said that some of it was high and low. Whatever it was, we had this debate. What will the consequence of that be? What are our party and other members have said tonight is the government has to rethink its position. It has to see the support for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. It has to recognize the evaluation that was done has real meaning and real weight.

It is never too late to say that a second opinion is okay, or that a different decision is okay. Maybe a good decision to continue the work of the foundation will come out of this debate. I think all members of the House would applaud that.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I will be splitting my time with the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

I am very glad to be rising in the House tonight, even at this late hour, to participate in this emergency debate. The first thing I would like to do is to thank the member for Churchill who applied for this emergency debate, which was granted by the Speaker, and to thank her for bringing this forward so that we could actually participate in this really critical discussion tonight about what is going to happen to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

When the member for Churchill led off the debate at the beginning of the evening, I remember her speaking about the fact that she was not in the House when the historic apology took place on June 11, 2008. I am sure she, like others across the country, was probably in her community with many people who were witnessing that historic occasion.

I remember being here in the House that day. It was a beautiful sunny day. People were gathered outside. I remember hearing the apology. I remember hearing the first nations representatives who came on the floor of the House and spoke. I remember phoning back to my riding of Vancouver East that night and talking to people in the downtown east side who had gathered at the Aboriginal Friendship Centre at Hastings and Commercial.

I remember feeling what they had gone through to some extent. I was not there. I was here. However in talking to people, I heard about the pain that people went through listening to that apology, and the grief, the sense of loss, anguish and trauma that it brought forward.

I also heard from people that they had a sense of hope about what that apology meant. By the fact that it was given by the Prime Minister, the Government of Canada and all parties, it carried this historic weight of something very important.

It is ironic that not quite two years later we are back in this House debating, in an emergency situation, whether or not the Aboriginal Healing Foundation will be able to continue. In fact, it will not be able to continue under the current state of affairs because of the loss of funding.

It is further ironic because the day its funding ends will also be the 50th anniversary of voting rights being extended to aboriginal people in this country.

What is going on here feels totally wrong. We have heard the arguments from the government that all these other programs are going to continue. I have listened to people in my community, people like Jerry Adams who is a very wonderful aboriginal leader in East Vancouver from the Circle of Eagles. He wants to know how anybody can open the doors of pain and not follow up with a healing plan to make it better for the families involved, and how the 400-plus page study that was given to the government about the importance of helping the residential school survivors can be of no importance now.

He went on to say other things as well, but it just struck me that he really has hit the chord there. When we look at the evaluation of community-based healing initiatives supported through the Aboriginal Healing Foundation that was done not very long ago, on December 7, 2009, we see it is a very strong and uplifting evaluation.

The evaluation found that the programs delivered through AHF are cost-effective, in demand, successful in contributing to the “increased self-esteem and pride”, to the achievement of higher education and employment and to prevention of suicide among survivors of residential schools, and more recently in the broader aboriginal community.

It seems really quite incredible that, with the apology that happened not quite two years ago and this kind of program evaluation, we are now in a place where this is all going to shut down.

How many times has this happened before? I was just looking back at my own files of letters we have written.

Whether it is about funding that is potentially being lost for the National Association of Friendship Centres and letters that were written to the ministers, whether it is the Lu'ma Native Housing Society and the fact that they were ready to close their doors and lay off staff because the government would not commit to renew their funding under the national homelessness initiative, whether it was letters we wrote in February of this year to Minister of State for the Status of Women about the fact that the Sisters in Spirit from the Native Women's Association of Canada were left in limbo over their funding, or whether it was that the more than 130 groups delivering these programs through the AHF had to find out through the tabling of the budget, on February 4, that their funding would not be renewed by the end of month, again we have to write another letter.

We keep coming back to this place. It challenges the credibility of that apology. This is why we are now facing such a serious situation in terms of what is happening to aboriginal people across the country and the fact that they are living in appalling conditions.

I find it difficult to talk in the community about this place, the House of Commons, the Canadian Parliament. We all talk about the commitment to what needs to be done. We raise it in question period and we hear about the commitments from the government. Yet we keep coming back to funding losses, cuts and programs that are going to be discontinued, even when they are shown to be successful.

It seriously undermines the belief of not only aboriginal people, but all Canadians in the credibility of their government standing for what it believes in, what it says it is willing to put forward. It stretches the credibility and undermines the legitimacy of the work we do when these promises get broken year after year.

I represent the community of Vancouver East, which includes Downtown Eastside. I have seen first-hand the impact of colonialism, the oppression of aboriginal people through the residential schools system. I have seen the devastation it has had on lives of people, successive generations and the community as a whole.

Each year I participate in the missing women's march on the Downtown Eastside. The 19th annual missing women's march was held on February 14. Many women have gone missing and are presumed murdered, many of them aboriginal.

The whole trauma and horror of what has taken place has manifested in this community. There is an impact on people's lives, whether it is through addiction, homelessness, deepening poverty that is made worse by serious cuts in programs, services and income support. Many people in my community live with that and try to survive day by day. I, as their representative, and other representatives try to deal with that.

Even with that kind of tragedy, I have also seen incredibly powerful initiatives come out of the community. For example, right now at the National Arts Centre is a very amazing play called Where the Blood Mixes, which speaks about the residential schools experience. We are seeing incredible creative expression as people try to engage in a healing process and speak to the broader Canadian society about what has taken place.

I have seen organizations, such as Vancouver Native Health Society, the Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society or the women's centre, that have taken this issue on and have provided support and services to people. People like Gladys Radek or Bernie Williams walked 4,000 kilometres across Canada in a Walk4Justice to raise awareness about the missing and murdered women.

Incredible expressions come out of the community of healing, of reconciliation and of people claiming their place and voice. The very least we can do is ensure the Aboriginal Healing Foundation can continue its mandate to provide the resources at the grassroots to the amazing projects that have taken place across the country.

We either get this or we do not. Either we follow through on these commitments or we have betrayed the aboriginal people of our country. That is a very serious question for the government to consider. I am glad we have had this debate tonight. We hope the government will reflect on this and restore the funding that is needed.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure that is exactly what the CBC reporter said. I think her words have been taken out of context. What does expanding trade and opening new markets actually mean? It sounds good but I am concerned that the primary purpose of government has become more new markets, more goods and more consumerism, and I think we need to question that.

I think a lot of people are questioning both the use of resources and how natural resources are being exploited but are also questioning how that exploitation is also an exploitation of human beings, human rights and labour rights. This agreement is flawed because it does not address what is taking place in Colombia. It does not give protection to people. While it might create new markets, the consequences of that are devastating on local communities in Colombia.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan has raised a whole other area of the trade agreement that is of deep concern to us and that is the impact on indigenous people.

When we look at this trade agreement we see that it has all kinds of benefits and luxuries. It is lined with profits for the huge multinational corporations that go into these resource-rich areas. Basically, indigenous people are taken off their land and their rights are trampled on. That is just another reason why this agreement should be rejected.

For an agreement to superimpose itself on traditional practices, take away people's land and destroy the land is something that is serious. It is something we have not fully understood the consequences and impacts of what that will mean in those local communities. I respect the member for raising this because it is another reason to reject this agreement.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise in the House today, and I hope there will be many more members who rise after me to debate this bill and to defeat this bill, because that is what we are aiming to do.

It was very interesting to hear the Minister of Labour just a few moments ago. I guess the Conservatives are feeling a bit vulnerable with respect to this bill now, feeling they have to send in more ministers to defend their very bad position on this Bill C-2, the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement.

I want to begin my remarks by thanking the NDP trade critic, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, who has done such an amazing job of bringing public awareness to this agreement and how devastating it will be for the people of Colombia.

We are the fourth party in the House, but I will say that we pack a lot of punch. With our friends in the Bloc, we have been holding up this bill for more than a year, and I know this is very troubling to the Conservative government. As with everything else, the Conservatives would just like to ram this bill through. They do not have any respect for this place. In fact, they are quite contemptuous of the House and its proceedings. Should we dare to actually debate something in depth and give analysis, they consider that to be very problematic. But I am really glad we are debating this bill and are shedding the full light of day on what this agreement is all about.

It strikes me that so often these terrible trade agreements are negotiated by nameless bureaucrats and appointees and representatives in backrooms. God knows where they meet; it is all done in secret. We know, in fact, that this particular deal took over one and a half years to negotiate.

There is so little we know about the process. There is so little vested in citizen participation. In fact, there is not any citizen engagement. More and more people, not only in Canada but around the world, are rejecting the whole notion of trade taking place through secret agreements done behind closed doors. This manifestation of globalization, this delegation of power to people who are not accountable and not elected, is something more and more people are disturbed about and are rejecting.

I am really glad we are taking this on in the House and are saying we will not put up with it. We will not allow this agreement to go through and we will do everything we can to stop this free trade agreement from being ratified by the House of Commons. As the member for Burnaby—New Westminster has pointed out, the U.S. Congress and the European parliaments have taken a similar stance. It is the present Conservative government and the Liberal Party that is supporting it who are way out of step and way out of line.

I have heard a number of the speeches in the House on this agreement. I remember when it came up a year ago. It was then Bill C-23. We debated this same bill and I heard many of the arguments.

I remember some comments that the member for Elmwood—Transcona made a few days ago in debating Bill C-2. He pointed out, and rightly so, that citizens, consumers themselves, are saying they want to see fair trade. People as consumers are rejecting products and services that are based on trading practices that they know to be exploitative and based on the whole ideology of the race to the bottom and the conferring of greater and greater rights on multinational corporations. The member's comments were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of reflecting that there is a change in society and that people are no longer willing to put up with these kinds of agreements.

We are being fed a line that somehow this agreement will be good for the people of Canada and for the people of Colombia. There is really no evidence to show that. We do know, however, that it will be very good for corporations that will benefit from this trade agreement. There lies the evidence of what is going on here.

As parliamentarians, we have a responsibility and a duty to examine these agreements from the point of view of the public interest, not from the point of view of private and corporate interests. That is what we are here to do, to defend the public interest and the rights and potential and the vision of what citizens in both countries want to see in terms of their own personal development, their community and their society at large. That is only one of the reasons this agreement should be rejected.

I read some of the background information to the bill and noted that information has been provided by the Canadian Labour Congress and Human Rights Watch in the Now magazine. They have compiled a lot of information about the bill and came up with 10 reasons why it should be rejected. They call it the Colombia count. Their number one reason is that more labour leaders are killed every year in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined: 474 since 2002 and 2,865 in the last 25 years. That is truly an appalling record and very disturbing when we couple that with the fact that Colombia has labour laws that actually shut down and stifle workers' rights, that its rate of unionization is less than 5%, the lowest of any country in the western hemisphere, and that we have had these paramilitaries, these deadly groups that have been murdering people and stifling rights. In 2008 alone, 27 high-ranking army officials were accused of kidnapping and executing civilians. The litany of the horrors goes on and on.

While we heard from the labour minister today that this side agreement is somehow lifting the bar and that we should be proud of it, members of the NDP reject the whole premise that there is some kind of side agreement which is not in the main body of the text. We are calling for an independent human rights assessment. That is the least that should be done in terms of any movement on the bill. We owe it to our brothers and sisters in Colombia. We owe it to the memory of all of the labour leaders and the community activists who have been murdered, harassed or imprisoned and prevented from doing the kinds of things that we would consider to be entirely legitimate and democratic here in Canada. We owe it in their memory to ensure that there is an independent human rights assessment.

I believe that if we had the courage to turn down this agreement, we would actually have support from people in Canada. In my own community in east Vancouver, we have businesses up and down Commercial Drive, which is a very well-known place in Vancouver and a wonderful place to visit. Many of the businesses are engaged in a program and a campaign to promote fair trade. We believe it is the first street in Canada to be named a fair trade street where businesses are encouraged to both sell and use products that are as a result of free trade. It is really remarkable that small, independent businesses are actually choosing to take that route. They are actually saying that they have made the choice not to buy products from suppliers, companies or corporations that have been engaged in the exploitation of workers and engaged in practices that degrade the environment.

It is a wonderful thing when we see that expression coming forward from the grassroots, the local communities. It tells us that there is another path, another vision, an alternative that is based on the notion of trade that supports the rights of people, and that is the fundamental test.

These trade agreements are about the privileges and the huge benefits that these multinational corporations get. We should completely reverse that and say that these agreements need to be about the rights of workers, of civil society, of the environment and of social standards. If we could base our agreements on that, we would see very different agreements in place. We would be prepared to look at that and negotiate those kinds of agreements.

I would like to see more people up in the House defeating Bill C-2. We do not want it to go ahead. This is a bad bill. Let the House of Commons speak for the people of Canada and say that we reject this free trade agreement because it is a bad trade agreement that will only hurt the people of Colombia.