Malcolm Allen

[Buy Local, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, food is a vital part of our lives, and what we put into our bodies is not only reflected back to us in our personal health, but also in the health of our communities.

If we support local farmers, businesses and crafts people with our daily purchases, we will be ensuring the long-term vitality and viability of our communities.

We have all become accustomed to instant satisfaction, so what I am suggesting is that we each take a step back and follow the chain behind our purchases and ask: Where does the product we are purchasing come from? Where does our money end up? Does the chain end up in another country or a farmer's field just outside our town?

In the Welland constituency we have three fantastic farmers' markets that serve our communities with fresh healthy produce and meats every week, every year.

I encourage all constituents to take the time to check out what the farmers' markets have to offer. People should remember, that if they ate today, they should thank a farmer, and remember to buy local or it could be bye, bye local.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, people always have to be careful about acronyms because they can get caught up in them. The ILO has clearly stated what it believes should be the minimum standards when it comes to labour. Indeed, the Canadian Labour Congress is calling for those standards.

The difficulty is we have added it as an addendum. We did not enshrine it in the agreement. We could have. We cannot say that no one else has done it, that we would be the first to do it and that we could not get it done. The Americans did it. That begs a simple question. Why did we not? It was not that the Peruvians did not want to do it. They did it with the Americans, who are a trading partner of ours. The Americans have the same sorts of rules that we do because we entered into NAFTA with them. It is not as if Peru was to find that as a foreign piece. It just simply did not want to do it and our government said okay. I do not believe the Conservative government actually believes in enshrining labour rights inside the agreement.

The fundamental question we should ask is this. Was it really the Peruvian government that said no, or was it the government across the way that simply said that it was not important enough to do? Did it say it did not care, that would not put it in the agreement? However, when there was some pressure, it then tacked it on the back of the agreement.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I wish I could answer that for my colleague. I wish I could give him an answer that makes sense and that would be representative of the House, but clearly does not make sense.

One would hope that we would want to hear from someone who has intimate knowledge of what happens in the southern hemisphere. As much as Peru is not identical to Colombia with regard to trade policy and internal operations, there are indeed lessons to be learned and things that we could have learned. Unfortunately, the committee had an opportunity to learn and it turned it down.

For those who made that decision to turn her down, they should always remember that learning is always a positive thing, regardless of whether they think they believe in the piece or not. There is always value is learning new things and having them validated. Unfortunately, in this case, the young woman was not heard by the committee and that did an injustice to the House. More important, it did an injustice to those members who said no.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, one could argue that the only boy scouts around here are those who sit in government now and the others who sat in government before them. When they bargained the North American Free Trade Agreement, they gave away everything, including the forestry agreement, then they lost nearly every challenge to the Americans since. Therefore, one might argue that the boy scouts were those two governments and they gave things away.

We need to look at the sense of this fairness aspect to trade policy. Trade policy is about not taking advantage of one country over another. That is the intent. That is the spirit of the policy when we enter into it.

My hon. colleague talks about how much we send to Peru through the business route and how much Peru sends back to us. However, I remind my colleague that the majority of that dollar value out of Peru is raw resources and a lot of it is gold. It comes out of Peru as gold, not as finished products, and heads north and a lot of it heads back into the country to be reprocessed. We are extracting raw materials from Peru and quite often bringing them into the northern hemisphere to reprocess them into finished product of one dimension or another.

In a lot of ways Peru reminds me of Canada in its infancy 150 years ago, when we used to extract things. Some might say that this is what is happening to us again because we seem to be extracting raw materials and sending them out of the country to let someone else do things for us.

We see both things happening. Peru's industries are extraction industries, which are Canadian held in most cases. Without a question, Canadian mining corporations are some of the best in the world. They have gone to all these different countries to set up mining operations, and they have done that in Peru. They are extracting that raw material from Peru and sending it elsewhere to be processed.

The figures are somewhat skewed. They do not really give a true indication of what type of trade goes back and forth between this country and Peru. I remind the hon. member that numbers can look bad or good depending on how one tries to frame them. In this case it may look like there is a trade imbalance between us and Peru, but then again, by the time we finish the product, it may be indeed more valuable.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to this bill today.

It is of utmost importance not only to Canadian workers and Canadian society but obviously to Peruvian workers and Peruvian society as well.

Quite often the government, as well as their new coalition partners, the Liberals, is really fond of talking about rules-based agreements. When one thinks of those terms, it sounds rather magnanimous, we are going to have rules. The first thing that comes to mind is that somehow the rules will be even-handed, because most of us grew up playing games that had rules in them that were about fairness, equity and making sure that those who were not as gifted as others when it came to the games we were going to play could be included. So we developed rules for that.

Here we have this agreement that is based on rules, but we have to ask the fundamental question, “Who set the rules and for whom were they set?” When we look at this particular agreement, the rules are set but clearly they are set for one group to dominate another. We did not learn anything from NAFTA's chapter 11. We might have learned to do it a little bit better in the sense of making sure that those who could take advantage could take advantage even more.

What we have inside this agreement is indeed still that style of chapter investor protection that we all have come to recognize does not work well. If it does not work well and the rules are not working for Canadians and for other trading partners who sign on to those agreements, then why indeed would we continue to make them part of the rules, why would we not amend them or change them drastically to make sure that they are not in there.

In fact, we can see in other more modern agreements, and my colleagues in this House quite often tend to use the term fair trade, that they still use fair trade with chapter 11-type agreements. Whereas a fairer trade would actually eliminate those types of provisions and deal on a more even-handed basis with all participants in trade, including workers, the environment, civil society and communities as a whole. However, that gets lost in this agreement.

One may well ask, “Well, who sets the rules?” In this particular case, the government of this country bargained this agreement with the government of Peru. Did it have ability to do that? Yes. Does it have the moral authority to do that? Well, in Peru, I would suggest the Peruvian government does not. President Garcia's most recent poll ratings are 19%. One can say, “Well, a poll is a poll”. That gages public sentiment at least. And the public sentiment clearly shows that less than one in five Peruvians agree with the leadership of that government.

If the Peruvian government is about to set the rules for Peru in the labour movement, for workers and general society, and four out of five or 80% of the population is not in agreement with that government, is it going to be setting rules that really are about fairness for all of those citizens of that country? I think that when one does the arithmetic, one would have to come to the conclusion that no, that is not the case.

Here we have a rules-based agreement being set up by a group, in this particular case the Peruvian government, that really has no moral authority to do so. Consequently, how do we know what the Peruvian government is saying to us is really representative of what Peruvians are saying to their government? I think we have to doubt, very much, what exactly it is saying to us.

We need to look no further than what the Peruvian authorities do in their actions inside their own government, inside the country, for us to take a look to see if indeed we should believe the things they are telling us they will do, when indeed inside the country itself they are doing the opposite of what they are telling us they will do.

As my colleagues pointed out earlier, there is this question of how the Peruvian government treats trade unions, especially in the public sector, where basically it is taking away the right of collective bargaining; however, one of the rules in the rules-based agreement is to protect collective bargaining.

The Garcia government says “We are going to protect that type of right. We are going to enshrine it as a piece off to the side of the agreement”, and I will get back to talking about why it should be in rather than outside the agreement, but yet by its deeds it is actually taking rights away from collective bargaining and from workers in general.

So, here we have the government of Peru saying one thing, and some folks would use the old acronym “talk is cheap” when it is saying one thing, but when it gets to doing the walk and doing the deed, we can see the dastardly deed it does when it takes rights away from workers, takes collective bargaining away from workers, and it puts processes in place that would affect those workers, the very workers that it is supposed to represent. This is a government that is supposed to protect its workers, as we should be protecting ours. But then again that is a debate of probably another bill for another day as to how well the current government and the preceding one actually protected workers in our international trade agreements. One could argue, I would say, very successfully that that did not happen in this country either.

So, when we look at that sense of where workers are in Peru and the fact that only 9% are really covered by unions and that minimum wages cover a certain portion of the population, we would say that does not seem so bad, that it looks like it is going to up. In fact, I believe the statistics state it went up to $176 a month. I know that is a very paltry sum in this country, but that is a different society. But then again, if we delve much deeper and we actually look at what is the minimum wage and who does it cover, we find by the very deed that it in fact covers very few people at all because the vast majority of folks work in what is called an informal economy.

Here we might have called that under the table or the grey market, which usually is a market where people go out and work to subsidize an already established income. They have a job but maybe they work on the side. Dare I say it, the grey economy is usually to avoid taxes in this country.

However, the informal economy in Peru is the majority of the economy, where wages are not the paltry $176 a month but are $20 to $30 a month, which is not quite 15% of the minimum wage.

We all know that minimum wage is really established as the floor. But really what we have is folks not living on the floor but living underneath it. The vast majority of them, indeed, are living underneath it. And here we have this agreement, entered into by the current government and the government of Peru, to somehow do something to help folks who are below the floor when we see the government is not enacting legislation to help them rise up even though it says in the agreement that it will definitely do that.

So when one looks at what is said in agreements and the words that are written there, it is the deeds that are done by government that actually tell us whether the words will true or they will ring hollow.

In the case of the Garcia government, clearly they ring hollow, and the echo is deafening. They do not protect the workers in Peru nor civil society in Peru. Large tracks of the indigenous population in Peru are saying they do not want this agreement, that it is not good for the Peruvians.

I would argue it is not necessarily good for Canadians either, in certain aspects, because it did not get rid of the chapter 11 situation. It did not get rid of that whole sense of investor rights. I would call it investor privilege because the labour organizations and workers in this country do not get treated on an equal footing. If we cannot equate the two and we cannot make them equal, then we cannot have fair trade. It will always be free trade for some and an obligatory trade for others, those of us who have to live under the rules and those who get to write the rules. That will never make agreements fair for all of us who participate in them.

So, when we look at this agreement, and there are a number of folks who have, and we are looking at the implementation of this agreement, not the debate of the agreement, obviously, but simply the implementation of it, we ask, “Is this in the best interests of those who are there?”

My colleague from Scarborough—Guildwood has a private member's bill before the House that talks about mining companies and talks about how they should behave in a manner that is fair and equitable, similar to what they do in this country, when they are in South America, and places like Peru.

In my riding office, I have received literally thousands of signature cards from young people, their parents, grandparents, and in some cases their great grandparents who are saying that until the government can make sure that workers in Peru and other parts of the hemisphere are treated fairly and the same way they are treated in Canada for the same corporations, then we shouldn't enter into these agreements. By signing these cards, they are saying they do not agree with this agreement. They do not agree that this agreement is actually a good model for Peruvian workers in Peruvian society.

When there is an outpouring of support which was not generated by me as the MP but by civil society in my riding and there is a private member's bill that talks about that, and is supported by literally tens of thousands across this country, that should tell us something about what people feel and intrinsically know is not a good deal, and so should we.

As parliamentarians we should know it is not a good deal. We should know that we should have labour and environmental standards. Why are we any different than the U.S. when it actually signed a deal, albeit flawed? The U.S. signed a deal and enshrined the labour and environmental standards in the body of the collective agreement. I call it a collective agreement because it is bargained between two countries.

Normally, in collective bargaining, when something is intrinsically important to the parties, it is put in the body of the agreement because that it is how it is defined and enshrined as being that important. It is not put in as a side piece or an addendum. It is not added on at the back. It is not referred to in a chart. It is put in the body of the agreement because that is the weight given to it.

When we look at this agreement, what do we find in the body of it? We find the usual platitudes of the back and forth between two governments and, of course, investors' rights enshrined in the heart of the agreement. We do not find that as an addendum or a chart. We do not find it stapled to the back of the agreement. Yet, when it comes to the fundamental situation of labour and workers' rights, it is tacked on at the back.

Let us look at the environment, the very place in which we live. We have all heard the horror stories about environmental degradation throughout the entire world and Peru is not immune to that. It is, indeed, in the same situation as other countries where environmental degradation has taken place against their best interests and wishes in a lot of cases. Why would we not have enshrined that in the heart of the agreement? We tacked that one on the back as well.

When the question is raised as to why it is not in the body of the agreement, the answer is, “Trust us, we have your best interests at heart”. Again, those are words and the words “trust us” from the Peruvian government are not matched by the very deeds it talks about when indigenous people are being forced off their lands. There was an attempt by the Garcia government to change the constitution so there would be a different voting structure to remove people, which was eventually lost in a constitutional challenge.

Good for those who challenged it through the Peruvian constitution and said the president of the country could not do that. Unfortunately for them, the constitutional courts upheld it and said no, the government would have to enshrine and secure all of the pieces, which takes two-thirds of a vote to remove people who would give up land willingly.

If we left it to Garcia to do, he would have removed indigenous people in favour of mining corporations. In fact, he was quoted one time as telling a mining company not to worry, he would take care of it, the company would get its land claim and be able to set up its mine. He forgot to ask the folks who actually owned and lived on the land if that is what they wanted. Until this particular point, they said no. That mine has not established itself yet and good for the indigenous folks who live and farm there.

From the NDP's perspective, when it comes to Canadian agriculture, we did not get the same deal that the Americans got. If we were to look at some of the pieces that may be of benefit to Canadian agriculture, there were certainly some issues around the grains and pulse sectors.

When it comes to the red meat sector, we did not get the same access that Americans did. Why would we sign a deal that is inferior to the Americans? On one side, we are unable to get the open access to the markets, which the government says it wants, yet it is willing to sign a deal that does not open the market the way it wants it to.

There is the old adage that half a loaf is better than none, but I would argue half a loaf that has gone bad is probably worse than none. At least if we start at the beginning, we have an opportunity to craft something that makes sense and that is a positive benefit for all the parties. In this case, it seems the bill will not do that.

We did not get the open markets. The Peruvian government says that it will do certain things and then it restricts things when it comes to workers. It agrees to a settlement process that states a fine might have to be paid, yet it turns a blind eye. It reminds me of one of the old Monty Python skits of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. It has become one of things that is between the mining corporations and those who will benefit directly from this agreement. It has become the nudge, nudge, wink, wink of an agreement.

The government pretends it has this agreement, that it will include a piece about labour and environmental standards in the agreement and that we should not worry because we it will not have to walk the walk. It then will be able to tell its friends and international labour organizations that it has this as part of the agreement, but that is not the case. It is simply an add-on.

The Americans did not do that because the agreement would be held up in the U.S. Congress. They enshrined the labour and environmental pieces inside the agreement to ensure it would pass through the House of Representatives. It is still flawed because those provisions about the same penalties still apply and no one is certain how that penalty will be exacted and enforced because there are no teeth when it comes to those pieces.

That is the problem. The investor piece gets an arbitration panel, gets to make charges before it. Yet with the labour and environment pieces, there may be a fine. Again, this is a flawed agreement that is weighted on one side and not on the other.

One has to wonder if this is the future for us. Will we continue down this path of constantly opening up free markets and free agreements that are not fair or balanced? It would seem that is the case. It seems we have not learned anything from the previous ones. We have learned to perhaps placate those of us who say those are wrong-headed agreements, but we have never learned to fundamentally change the direction so we develop fair trade agreements.

If we are not going to do that, why would we sign flawed agreements? That is a fundamental question that all members should ask themselves. If we know the agreements are flawed, and I have heard many members say that it is not exactly what we want, or not quite what they would like to see, why sign it? Why not take it back and start again? Why not listen to those parties who have said that it is flawed and have given suggestions how to fix it? It is not just a question of opposing for opposition's sake. It is saying that it is flawed and here are some fixes.

The Peruvian population is saying the same. There are things we need to do to fix it and we are willing to come forward to give the governments the opportunity to fix it. The agreement could have a number of propositions that will enhance the bill and make it fair for both countries so we can trade.

It should never be confused that somehow those who oppose free trade agreements, especially those that have chapter 11 enshrined in them, are opposed to trade. It is not the case. We all understand that trade takes place on this globe and it is one of the things we have done for centuries. We will always continue to do that. However, we should not allow ourselves to sign flawed agreements that will either not benefit Canadians or those of our reciprocal trade partners. We should never stoop to taking advantage of those who find themselves in precarious situations. It should be about even-handedness and ultimately about fairness.

That fairness will drive equality for both partners and ultimately then, and only then, will we have trade agreements that all of us, I believe, unanimously could stand up and support. We should strive to be there because that would be equitable and fair for all the parties and for the world.

[General Motors, May 15th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday we witnessed the closure of the GM truck plant in Oshawa. Canadians mourn the end of almost a century of truck making in the region. Our thoughts and hearts go out to the workers and their families.

The closing of the award-winning facility that produced the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra will affect thousands of workers and their families, further impacting an already devastated industry and the communities. It is a tragic irony that what was originally a Canadian company established by Sam McLaughlin would be taken over by Americans only to have those jobs and production shifted to Mexico.

My NDP colleagues and I will continue to speak up for auto workers and their families in Oshawa, in my community and throughout Canada. We will continue to press the government for immediate, meaningful and long-term action to help preserve a vital Canadian industry.

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2009]

Mr. Chair, it is interesting to hear the minister say that the markets will get them out of debt.

I do not have as many cattle producers or hog producers in my neck of the woods as members out west do, but nearly all of them are saying the same thing. They are not making any money at this. They are all losing money, yet the response is always that the market will get them out of it. So far the market has not done them any good. We have expanded markets and they just keep losing more money.

Hog producers were in the Senate courtyard recently. The president of the Ontario Pork Producers told me that he does not need another loan. He needs money.

The minister said there may be challenges at the WTO. The WTO is not going to save our hog farmers if we just--

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2009]

Mr. Chair, I will move to agri-stability. The minister may have answered this before. The 2009 budget states:

The Government will also work with interested provinces toward devolution of delivery of the AgriStability program to support improved client service through wider integration and alignment with other business risk-management programs already delivered provincially. Integrated provincial program delivery would help ensure that the suite of programs meets producers' needs.

Saskatchewan producers are saying that there seems to be a negative margin and negative margins do not work with agri-stability. That formula does not work for them. Is the government going to do something to address the agri-stability formula program? They are in a negative balance all the time. The program is not going to look at that except to say no, which means they are not really going to get out of debt.

If it is only going to be loans and they are already in debt, and all we are asking them is to take on more debt, do we have a plan to get them out of debt?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2009]

Mr. Chair, I appreciate that response.

Hopefully when it comes to those changes at the CFIA they are not moving at the same speed that Mr. Kyte mentioned last night when referring to the regulations. He suggested that they move like glaciers. Hopefully the training will move a lot faster than a glacier.

The minister did raise the XL plant, so let me go to that. As we know, in less than 40 days the Competition Bureau actually approved the sale of the Tyson beef packing plant to XL. Now that XL has closed, the only major beef packing plant between Toronto and central Alberta reminds me of the cannery in St. Davids that closed, the last one east of the Rockies. It just seems to be going the other way, westward.

The CCA says that the closure may be permanent. “We're not certain”, the CCA's research arm, CanFax, is quoted as saying “The closure will lower prices for both fed and non-fed cattle”. That was in the April 30 issue of The Western Producer. CCA's CanFax also said of the closure, “We're reducing capacity and the plants don't have to go out there and be quite as aggressive on their bids to procure cattle”.

The question really is, did we know this? Did we know that the Tyson-XL sale would lead to less aggressive bidding and lower cattle prices? Is that not what the Competition Bureau really should have been looking at in the first place to ensure that it did not happen?

[Business of Supply, May 14th, 2009]

Mr. Chair, the fact that we cannot have a determined number absolutely escapes me. In most industries I have ever been involved with there is always an ability to head count. The problem the CFIA has when it comes to its meat inspection system is that the CFIA cannot quantify it. Yet we are supposed to trust it with the safety of our food products.

The other evening the Canadian Meat Council suggested that “CFIA inspectors need to have regular consistent training”.

The Canadian Meat Council said, “It was evident to us after the new listeriosis control policy was implemented on April 1, 2009 that many inspectors didn't know enough about proper aseptic sampling techniques”.

We heard about that in the paper, and I believe the CFIA discontinued doing it for a period of time.

Will we provide the resources to enable the CFIA to make sure that the testing procedures that it needs to complete get done? If it indeed involves overtime, are we willing to pay it to get it done? Has it been completed as of now?