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House Hansard - 170

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 21, 2023 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23
Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)
  • Mar/21/23 10:18:52 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this important topic, and I want to recognize the work of my colleague from Dufferin—Caledon, our shadow minister for trade, who is thinking very much about how to not only advance Canada's economic interests in trade, but also apply moral values and principles to the approach we take to trade and the importation of products. When most Canadians think about slavery, they think of history. They think of stories they have heard or read, or movies they have seen, about the Underground Railroad, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the American Civil War, and figures such as Abraham Lincoln and William Wilberforce. These are important things for us to learn about from our past to understand the ongoing legacies and harms that resulted from that violence. However, we need to also immediately associate the reality of slavery with the contemporary experience. The ongoing reality is that there are people, many people, in our world today who are enslaved, who are forced to work against their will without pay, or without proper pay, and who are compelled into those positions as a result of various forms of disadvantage, in many cases because of their ethnic identity. As well, we have trading relationships with countries that are involved in the horrors of modern-day slavery. When we reflect on the injustices of the past and wonder how people allowed that to happen or why people were so indifferent, we need to then pull that reality up to today and ask why we are not doing more. It was not everyone, but many people were so indifferent to the horrors that were happening around them at those times. We need to ask why today we are not more seized with the reality of modern day-slavery and with the actions we need to take in order to respond. A few years ago, I visited Whitney Plantation, and it was a powerful exposition of the horrors of slavery as it existed in the United States in the past. It is very important for all of us to bring that reality forward and recognize the continuing horrors of slavery today. There are limits to what those of us in Canada, whether we as Canadian parliamentarians or members of the Canadian public, can do to respond to these horrors, but at a minimum, we should be setting a firm standard of not being complicit. That is, we should be doing everything within our power to not be in any way supporting or enabling the practice of slavery around the world. That includes firmly saying no to the importation of any products made from slave labour. I think there would be agreement in the House on the principle that we should not be purchasing products made from slave labour, but the problem has been the complete absence of will on the part of government to implement this. As my colleague said, we have seen no shipments of products from the Uighur region in China stopped as a result of slave labour. There was one case of a shipment that was stopped and then subsequently released. We can compare that level of enforcement to the much stronger levels of enforcement we have seen in the United States and other countries. Any time we have a significant gap of enforcement on an issue in Canada, and we can say a similar thing about foreign interference, frankly, and there are high levels of enforcement, such as shipments being stopped and people being arrested or expelled for spying, etc. in other countries, then we need to ask if this is because Canada is not being targeted or if it is because Canada is not being effective in its enforcement. We should not have a situation where ships containing products made from slave labour are told they cannot dock in Seattle but then have the same ships with the same products dock in Vancouver. That is not, in any way, morally acceptable. Let us acknowledge as well that international supply chains are complicated. Saying as a moral absolute that we should not be importing products made from slave labour is something I hope we can all agree on, but figuring out the systems and processes that are going to get us there is potentially challenging and complicated. However, what my colleague has said, and rightly so, is that we should simply work with the Americans to collaborate and align our enforcement, using the information and research they have already gathered. That would make the enforcement process much simpler. I would like to to see us go further than that. I would like to see us gathering together like-minded partners from around the world to ask if we can have a common standard, as well as common tools of enforcement to keep out products made from slave labour. Given the research and analysis that is required, if we can have a group of like-minded partners, G7 countries, or perhaps others, saying that we will all work together to ensure the effective enforcement of rules around keeping out products made from forced labour, then it would be less resource-intensive for us to do that work. We could simply say that, if an analysis has been done collectively among allies or by a trusted agency within a country that says that there is a high risk that particular products were produced with slave labour, then those products will not be able to be sold in any of the partner countries working together on this common frame. I think that makes sense from a moral perspective and follows up with our moral obligations. It also makes sense from practical and resource perspectives. Why would we have a different assessment from our partners and allies on whether a particular product was made from slave labour? It has been encouraging to see in the United States, which is admittedly a highly partisan environment, issues surrounding forced labour have been effective cross-party collaborations between Republicans and Democrats. I would like to see that spirit prevail in this place as well, but it requires, I think, the government to listen and respond to the legitimate concerns that have been brought forward because, the government has done nothing so far. We have, and I give due credit, a private member's bill from an individual member of the government that deals with a specific issue around disclosure, but we have not seen, contrary to promises that have been made, government legislation on some of the broader issues around forced labour and supply chains. We have not seen what many people are calling for, which is a specific targeted approach to some of these extreme hot spots of forced labour. In some cases, we see forced labour happening in ungoverned or less governed places. It happens outside of the law, without the official sanction of the state involved but, notably, in the case of the Uighur region in China, we see forced labour happening in a way that is coordinated as part of a genocide of the Uighur people, a genocide the House has recognized, but that the government has still failed to recognized. When we have a state-directed genocide associated with forced labour, surely we should have a targeted approach to that specific region. I have said many times before that I support a framework that aligns with the bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the United States, which presumes that products that come out of the Uighur region have forced labour involved in those products, unless it can be proven otherwise. If it can be proven otherwise, they are okay, but it is reasonable to presume that products coming out of that region have a very high risk of forced labour, so we should just say no to products coming out of that region, unless we can prove otherwise. If we were to adopt measures like this, it would strengthen that alignment, that opportunity for shared enforcement, among allies. I would continue to call on the government to benefit from the work that is being done in other countries. This is a case where it is acceptable to copy someone else's homework. When the work is being done in other countries, we can be more effective in our enforcement of keeping products made from forced labour out if we simply work with our allies. In closing, I would submit this: If slavery were still going on in an industrial scale in North America, if there were still plantations in the southern United States, we would not be comfortable importing cotton or other products that came from those plantations. We would say no in that particular case. We should say no, as well, in the case of slavery happening in China or other parts of the world, and we should be effective in aligning our enforcement with our allies to get that done.
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