International Trade committee  I can't address everything that you said, but I would like to say one thing. What I'm advocating is not for Canada to set the benchmark on gender in free trade agreements. Canada has a lot to do itself on the gender agenda. We don't have pay equity. We don't have universal child

International Trade committee  The most important thing we need to do is ex ante data discovery. We need to do some analysis on what will be the impact of a proposed Pacific Alliance free trade agreement on women's lives. There are places we can look for help. I mentioned the OECD. UNCTAD also has the gender

International Trade committee  There are lots of different ways to talk about the status quo of the multilateral trade system in particular. I think we are stuck in the status quo with respect to the status of the negotiations. I said in my opening comments that multilateralism is dead. Really, in the trajecto

International Trade committee  Overwhelmingly we've put attention on women entrepreneurs in the gender in global trade agenda. That's important. It's very important. But the lion's share of women in the developing world work in the informal economy. They're wage earners or they're entrepreneurs in the informal

International Trade committee  ISDS is a controversial thing, partly because we have poor data. We have poor data on the impact of ISDS on attracting foreign investment. Conventional wisdom is that ISDS attracts foreign direct investment, but we have very inconsistent information about whether that actually ha

International Trade committee  There's a tendency, I think, in the Canadian media to talk about the gender in trade agenda as something that's the Trudeau government's invention. I'd like to underscore that actually this agenda is very broad-based. We can look to a lot of partners and countries, particularly E

International Trade committee  I have one more point. If we do negotiate an ISDS in the FTA—and I think it's quite likely that we will—we need explicit carve-outs in the FTA that shield human and environmental rights from ISDS and give governments the policy space that is necessary to pursue positive discrim

International Trade committee  Thank you, Chair and committee members, for inviting me here today. In addition to my role as senior fellow with the Canadian International Council, I'm also associate professor and chair of the department of political science at King's University College at Western University. W