Mr. Speaker, I am hoping that members will grant me a bit of indulgence at the beginning of my speech as we approach the end of our fall sitting to say thanks to all of our families whose support makes it possible for us to do our work here today. I want to give particular thanks to my partner, Teddy Pardede, who keeps things running on the home front while keeping his own life running, which enables me to do my work here in Ottawa.
I also want to give my thanks to my Ottawa staff, Sarah Manns and Michael Wiseman, and my constituency staff, Bruce Fogg, Martha Juillerat, and Elise Cote, without whom I could not do this job as a member of Parliament.
I also want to give my thanks to friends who pitch in and help make it possible for us to do our jobs, especially those of us who have difficult travel to get here. I would give an example from the beginning of this session when my partner had to fly home to Indonesia for a family emergency the day before the session was to begin. My friend of 33 years, Allyson McKay, stepped in to house and dog sit with no notice in order for me to be able to get here and do my work in the House of Commons. My Friend Chris Shewchuk also stepped in to help with the dog walking for the first days of those sessions.
These are all things that we sometimes forget about, our families, friends, and staff who support us in doing this work. Therefore, in the spirit of the season, I want to thank all of them and wish them happy holidays.
Now I will come to the topic of this debate today, the CETA.
The first thing I would say, as all New Democrats I think are saying in this debate, is “Europe, yes”. If there is any country we can trade with, it ought to be Europe, if we treat Europe as a country with its common standards. Why is that true?
Human rights standards are generally high within the European Union, and the European Convention on Human Rights means that many of the concerns that I have expressed in other trade agreements, in particular the trade agreement with Honduras, which has one of the worst human rights records in the world, are not a concern for me when we are talking about CETA.
The second reason for “Europe, yes” would be on the question of labour rights and labour standards. I have no doubt that workers in the European Union are able to organize unions, and those unions are able to represent their members' interests when it comes to things like labour standards. Therefore, if we are going to talk about free trade, of course, I prefer to think of it as fair trade, so that companies cannot win competitions based on who can exploit their workers the best, but they would have to do it on their ability to innovate and be efficient. Again, on labour rights and labour standards, obviously, “Europe, yes”.
On environmental protection, I think I can safely say the same kinds of things. In fact, in many cases, European standards and environmental protection exceed Canadian standards. Once again, we do not really want the competition in trade to be about who can burn through our resources and our environment the fastest and therefore win the trade war.
To start with, the question I have is not why a free trade agreement with Europe but why are we obsessed with one-by-one free trade agreements? What is it that drives us to this position, where Canada will end up with something like 100 free trade agreements if we keep going? Why are we abandoning working through multilateral international forums, like the World Trade Organization, or through conventions at the United Nations, which would lead to trade liberalization? There would be some really big advantages in going at trade in this manner.
We could, for instance, make sure that the poorest countries are not left out of these discussions. When we are discussing free trade, we are quite often talking about the privileged expanding their privileges around the world. It would also mean that underprivileged groups within countries might get more attention on the world stage, in particular, of course, with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which might get its rightful place when it comes to discussing trade agreements if we moved to multilateral international agreements.
We might also get to talk more about food security, and I will talk a little bit more about it in the context of this agreement. However, food security around the world is an important question when we have nearly one billion people, including far too many in Canada, who do not have secure access to food at an affordable price and do not have secure access to nutritious food. If we were talking about this on the world level, then some of the poorest of the poor, both within our own country and within countries around the world, would have their interests much better represented.
In talking about things like water security, we all know that water security is becoming an increasingly important issue around the world, yet it tends to be neglected in our discussions of these trade agreements. Many if not most of the products we produce have water as some aspect of the production process, and water is also needed to grow food and sustain human life.
Finally, if we were talking in more general terms we might then talk about greenhouse gas implications of long-distance shipping of goods all around the world. Is this really what is best for all of us, and are the costs of the long-distance shipping that goes on under these trade agreements really being accounted for at an international level?
I am still one of those who believe that trade liberalization is, yes, a good idea but it probably needs to take place in multilateral fora rather than these one-by-one free trade agreements. The one-by-one process also makes it difficult for those who have an interest in the agreements but maybe not as big a voice as the corporations to get their voices heard. We find that Canadians who are concerned with natural resources, food security, or local procurement have to make their case again and again as each of these agreements comes forward, and burn up precious resources in their organizations in trying to deal with each of these agreements. I think particularly of the environmental movement in this country, which has to examine literally thousands of pages of free trade agreements to try to make sure that our environment is not being damaged by these agreements. I would like to say that again if we were back to a multilateral focus we might have agreements that actually had environmental protection as one of the focuses of the agreements. I do not see that in any of these one-off agreements that we are doing.
When it comes to this specific agreement, are there some good things in it? One of those, I will say yes to as the NDP defence critic. It does have a fairly broad exemption for defence industries so that we can make sure that defence industries can be sustained in Canada. If we were to allow a free trade agreement to mean that our defence industries and our shipbuilding died out, we would be in dire straits in any conflict in being unable to supply our defence industries locally. As I read it, and I think as most people read it, there is a fair degree of protection there for our defence industries. I know that the previous speaker, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith, has been a very firm advocate of making sure that we have vital shipbuilding industries around the country.
I have a bit more of a question about maintenance under this agreement. This is something I have raised in the defence committee and I will raise again in the House today. There is an increasing tendency to open up contracts for maintenance of our defence facilities to bidders from outside the country. We know that the British got into a great deal of trouble, in fact, when some of their maintenance and supply contracts had critical materials coming from other European countries. When Britain got involved in the war in Afghanistan, countries that did not like that used their ability to control the end use of defence products to shut off supply under those contracts to the British. I have some questions still about this question of maintenance and supply under the CETA.
I have some other more serious concerns and I am not going to have time to talk about all of them today. The biggest of those is investor-state provisions. I cannot understand why we are entering into trade agreements where there is some substitute for the Canadian courts system being created and where businesses get privileged access to this system of arbitrators, and they can only use that system if they have millions of dollars to put up front to pay for these kinds of cases. As previous speakers have noted, Canada is already one of the most-sued countries in the world under investor-state provisions. How can we ensure that Canadian local, provincial, and even national governments are going to be able to protect our resources, protect our environment, protect state enterprises, protect our public health care, and protect the lower price of pharmaceuticals and not end up being sued under these investor-state provisions? Prescription drug costs are one of my biggest concerns because the agreement, if we sign it, would clearly increase drug costs by something like $1 billion a year in this country.
In drawing this to a close what I really want to emphasize is, yes to Europe. Obviously if we are going to trade with anyone, this would be the one. I am still concerned about this agreement and its impacts on our ability in terms of our democracy to continue to represent Canadians' best interests in the way that elected officials see possible, and not end up being sued and prevented from doing the right thing by the agreement's investor-state provisions.
