International Trade committee  First of all, I'd like to commend the Canadian government in one respect when it did come forward with what it called the most progressive and strongest labour chapter provisions, absolutely. Nonetheless, it's been rejected by Indonesia. There are examples in the CUSMA that are quite good.

International Trade committee  Do you mean with an ISDS mechanism that would monitor the companies or without, just in general?

International Trade committee  I like to think that countries know best how they want to manage their resource sectors. In the Indonesian case, there is an investment law that would cover foreign and national investors in exactly the same way. I would say that's probably sufficient. With mining companies being able to take out insurance when they operate abroad....

International Trade committee  Perhaps it wouldn't threaten the law necessarily, but it would create a different law for Canadian mining companies operating there, like a law that's more conducive to their interests. Both would exist. The national law would exist for national mining players, and then international mining players, like Canada, if there's a treaty, would get these extra super-laws that tend to treat countries quite favourably in disputes as they come up.

International Trade committee  A number of instances have come up very recently in the backlash against ISDS. There have been concerns that COVID measures, for example, might trigger a new wave of disputes. There have been cases related to the introduction of new public services that end up competing with private services.

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. I suppose it is in the region, but there was a case recently in Pakistan. Maybe members of the committee will have heard of it. It was Tethyan Copper, which involves Barrick Gold. This is a case where Pakistan was recently ordered to pay the company $6 billion U.S.

International Trade committee  That's a big question. Just in general, it's a matter of balance, as you say. The point of my presentation was that I wanted to make sure that, hopefully, the committee is thinking about ISDS in the context of these treaties because of the specifics of the region and the human rights situations in many of these countries.

International Trade committee  The CCPA believes that we should be stopping negotiating investor-state dispute settlement treaties of this kind. They don't add anything to the mix. They create a toxic environment in countries, especially where the people can see that their government might not be listening to their demands, but they have to listen to the demands of a foreign company that wants to build a mine somewhere that might be contested.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for the question. A couple of years ago, we at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report. The Canadian experience is that two-thirds of cases, investor-state dispute cases, brought mainly, almost entirely, by U.S. companies were against environmental or resource management policies, whether those involved a decision to phase out cosmetic pesticide use in Quebec, for example, or the Bilcon case in Nova Scotia, in which an environmental assessment process was disputed by a Canadian investor who had some investments in the United States.

International Trade committee  Unfortunately, we don't have an “after” just yet, because we have the legacy clause in the new NAFTA. There are still some investor-state cases happening until July 2023, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that investment has decreased or increased since we dropped the mechanism.

International Trade committee  That's a good question. I didn't come prepared to talk about some of the mechanisms that are being considered at the UN, for example, but there is a UN treaty on business and human rights that has been in development for, I think, about 10 years now. Canada has been a bit on the sidelines there.

International Trade committee  Yes, I do believe that. Greenpeace, which we worked with on that press release, believes that as well. There are tariffs on palm oil, as far as I understand it, that would come down as part of the negotiations. That would almost certainly result in Canada importing more palm oil from Indonesia.

International Trade committee  I'm not sure I have a great answer for that. From what I've seen and read, most of the time it's a question of proximity. Familiarity would be one of the reasons that we do a lot of business with the United States. Beyond that, I don't know. Given the government statistics, there is some evidence they are taking advantage of CETA as well, right?

International Trade committee  To the chair and the committee, thanks very much for the opportunity to present today. I'm speaking in my capacity as a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. It's a progressive policy research institute with offices in Ottawa and five other provinces. I'm going to focus my comments on the Canada-Indonesia comprehensive economic partnership agreement, but I think they also relate to the ASEAN and the India negotiations.

Economic Relationship between Canada and the United States committee  I would say yes. A buy Canadian policy is probably out of the question at this point, given the commitments we've made recently in the CETA and other agreements, but, as we've been proposing and other unions have been proposing, there can be sustainability criteria attached to public spending that would have similar effects.