International Trade committee  Good morning and thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm Sujata Dey, trade campaigner, national, Council of Canadians. I will be speaking to you in English. I am here with Steven Shrybman, one of our board members, who practises international trade and public interest law. He's a partner a

International Trade committee  There are countries that refuse to sign agreements with ISDS mechanisms in them, including Brazil and South Africa. India also has an interesting view on investment. It is possible to be a trading nation and not necessarily sign ISDS. Obviously, if ISDS had reforms in the sense t

International Trade committee  That's what they said about NAFTA, especially when we included Mexico, that we were going to need those protections for investors. However, most of the suits under NAFTA have been against Canada, so the kind of protection that we are getting out of it isn't necessarily worth it.

International Trade committee  Right. We've actually had a lot of our people—we have members all over the country—who have been quite disappointed to this point with the consultation process, particularly with the minister. Your initial consultations were meeting with stakeholders, and these were called open

International Trade committee  Good afternoon. My name is Sujata Dey, and I am in charge of the international trade campaign at the Council of Canadians. I will make my presentation in English, but I could answer your questions in French. Today we are coming full circle. The Council of Canadians was founded

International Trade committee  One of the things that's really important is that a lot of what happens in trade agreements can often be more symbolic. The most important thing I would put on the top of my list is “binding and enforceable”. For example, having the Paris climate agreement within the environment

International Trade committee  It's very much so. That's an interesting question, because you have to remember that water is becoming a multi-billion dollar industry. There is even trade right now on futures of water. It has become an investment vehicle. Those are very important. In NAFTA's annex, water is a

International Trade committee  We're the most sued developed country in the world, with 39 suits, and a lot of them over our environmental policies. We have to remember that we are a resource economy. We have a lot of resources, so as we try to protect our resources, we will get more and more suits as we chang

International Trade committee  Good morning. I am the head of the international trade campaign at the Council of Canadians. I will make my presentation in English, but it will be my pleasure to answer questions in French. The Council of Canadians has been keenly interested in issues of free trade since the

International Trade committee  It's an irony, because the first thing President Trump did in office was to say that he hated the TPP and he was going to rip it up. However, what has happened is that a lot of the provisions that were originally in the TPP made themselves into the new NAFTA. One of those is the

International Trade committee  We are not the economic modelers. We're relying on information from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who has modelled that information and has looked at what that would do to biosimilars and how that would act in the market, and what those costs would be to pharmacare. I urge pe

International Trade committee  There's quite a lot of research on how—

International Trade committee  This is what we were talking about, that most of the trade agreements have very little now to do with tariffs. Traditional trade agreements are going more into the regulatory space. You see that with ISDS, the investor-state dispute settlement, which is in quite a number of trade

International Trade committee  Good afternoon. My name is Sujata Dey, and I am responsible for the Council of Canadians' international trade campaign. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about the Canada—United States—Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, from outside the country. As you said, I am

International Trade committee  Okay.