SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)

Mar/21/23 10:32:08 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, if one wants to deal with slave labour products, all one has to do is walk through any shopping mall. It has been identified that 83 major brands are tied to slave labour, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Carter's, The Gap, Bosch, Calvin Klein, General Motors, Google and Dell. We have seen the reports. We know where these corporations are. Is it about working with our allies or simply saying, in Canadian law, that if a corporation is selling products in Canada from slave labour, it will be held accountable? I imagine that if we actually put laws in place to deal with that, the companies would up their standards. Right now, they are getting a free pass and it is not acceptable.

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Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mr. Garnett Genuis

Mar/21/23 10:33:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I share the hon. member's criticism of many of these companies. Frankly, they talk a good game when it comes to corporate social responsibility or community engagement in North America, but they completely fail to apply those principles in other countries. Some of the companies, for example, were very happy to talk about Black Lives Matter in North America, but they were not in China saying that Uighur lives matter. It was very clear, with many of these corporations, that if they were sincere about questions of racial justice and inclusion, for instance, they would understand that it is a global obligation to talk about these issues, not simply an obligation to talk about them in particular consumer markets where the discussion of those issues is more appreciated, as opposed to other places, where it would have been detrimental to their business to actually be focusing on these issues. We need to hold governments, as well as corporations, accountable, but I think it has to come down to enforcement. The government, in order to stop slave labour, has to stop these products from coming into Canada.

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Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mr. Brian Masse

Mar/21/23 11:58:33 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's work on our committee, where rights and fair balance are part of his regular work. One thing I look at is Quebec and Montreal, where the textile industry was undermined by public policy through our trade agreements. These agreements actually allowed for a lot of the work to go to Jamaica historically, and now it has been offshored to China and other places at the expense of good workers, a good system in place and good quality. That is what we have to look towards: our trade agreements and following up. If there are going to be supports, then we support, for example, child care, dental care and pharmacare. We support all the things that can actually subsidize the worker in the sense of making sure that any type of public money goes to training and the individual's well-being. In that way, governments will not just fund corporations and see the investment disappear to other areas; otherwise, we end up undermining ourselves by basically funding the competition.

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