44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 24, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/24/23 10:13:17 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition of great concern to residents of Saanich—Gulf Islands. People throughout this region have a deep concern for the fate of our wild Pacific salmon. The subject of the petition is the report of Mr. Justice Cohen on the fate of the salmon. The report came out during the time it was commissioned, when Stephen Harper was prime minister; it has been in front of us now for close to a decade, which is extraordinary to people in the region.
Briefly, the petition deals with the ongoing crisis of wild Pacific salmon. The petitioners note that the report of Mr. Justice Cohen has been in front of the government now for many years. There is a commitment to get the toxic salmon factories, known as salmon aquaculture operations, along the areas of Vancouver Island, particularly near the Discovery Islands' channels, out of the water. This would be done to remove the wild salmon stocks that are contaminated with diseases and viruses from the so-called farms.
The petitioners ask that the government move rapidly to enact all recommendations of the report of Mr. Justice Cohen and do so without further delay.
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Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased to get in on this round, because there has been a very interesting discussion between the member for Courtenay—Alberni, the member for Abbotsford and the hon. member for Danforth about investor protection agreements.
They are not trade agreements, so the member for Courtenay—Alberni is correct that the previous government under Stephen Harper executed a secret agreement. It never came before Parliament for a vote but was done as an order in council, committing Canada not to a trade agreement with the People's Republic of China, but to an investor protection agreement, as the member for Abbotsford referred to, a FIPA, that binds Canada for more than 31 years and in which challenges against Canadian law by corporations of the People's Republic of China do not require any public notice to Canadians and can proceed in secret.
I want to ask the hon. member for Danforth this. The current Canada-Ukraine agreement includes an investor protection agreement. When Canada renegotiated NAFTA with the U.S., it removed chapter 11, the investor protection agreement. Was any thought given, when renegotiating the agreement with Ukraine, to remove this quite anti-democratic provision? It is almost ubiquitous across the globe in trade agreements these days to include an investor protection agreement. Was any thought given to removing it from the Canada-Ukraine agreement?
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Madam Speaker, I begin the discussion today on Bill C-57, which is the updated Canada-Ukraine trade agreement.
We have had some conversation already this morning on the subject of the differences between trade agreements and investor protection agreements. I would like to approach that topic again and talk about the updated Canada-Ukraine trade agreement.
I would also like to put a frame around the fact that a number of Liberal MPs said that this agreement makes an effort to name climate change and to tackle climate change in trade agreements. I wish that were so. We have a long way to go if we are going to confront the ways in which the World Trade Organization and its creation have undermined the climate agreements, and multilateral environmental agreements in general.
With that frame, I will move very quickly through some of the larger issues here because it is unusual for us to have any opportunity in this place to address the trade and investor protection agreements and how they impact climate, and they do.
Let us start by looking at the last effective multilateral environmental agreement that the world has ever seen and that was the most effective. It was negotiated in 1987 in Montreal. It is, of course, the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer.
I was honoured to participate in those negotiations as senior policy adviser to the federal minister of environment in the Mulroney government back in those days.
If we look at the success of the Montreal Protocol, it is astonishing. We have not only arrested the destruction of the ozone layer through various ozone-depleting substances but also expanded that agreement with the Kigali Amendment so that it has also been an effective treaty that has helped reduce greenhouse gases.
One of the key reasons the Montreal Protocol was so successful was that the agreement to protect the ozone layer had enforcement mechanisms. It had penalties for countries that chose to ignore their commitments to protect the ozone layer. In fact, those treaty sanctions were so effective, they never had to be used because countries abided by their commitments in the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer.
The effective sanctions were trade sanctions. It is very hard to imagine any kind of international treaty that binds nation states and that has an effective punishment system that would be other than trade agreements. It is the most logical place in which we can inflict some degree of penalty on non-compliance.
The way the Montreal Protocol worked was that if any country ignored its commitments to reduce its use and to stop the production of chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances, then that country would be subject to trade sanctions from any other country that was a party to the Montreal Protocol.
Since every country on earth was a party to the Montreal Protocol, that was why it was a very effective mechanism. Ten years later, in 1997, in Kyoto, Japan, when we negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, tragically, Canada changed its position 180 degrees.
Instead of being a country that championed making those agreements effective by including trade sanctions, our minister of environment headed to Kyoto saying that if trade sanctions were included in the Kyoto Protocol for climate action, Canada would not sign.
What happened? In that 10-year window, there was the creation of the World Trade Organization. The end of the Uruguay Round negotiations resulted in a more established centre for trade work globally.
All of this emanated from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Article XX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had, since just after the Second World War, when it was negotiated, set aside and protected from trade sanctions those actions that were considered to be part of natural resource conservation and so on.
Article XX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade set aside, essentially, environmental protections without using that language. It certainly did not reference climate. We had the window there to protect what we did as nations, not for trade-motivated reasons or protectionist animus but for the legitimate pursuit of environmental protections. We could not be sanctioned by trade deals.
That all changed with the creation of the World Trade Organization. It created a committee called the Committee on Trade and Environment and instead of asking the useful question of whether we have trade agreements that get in the way of environmental protection, it asked a different question: Do we have environmental agreements that get in the way of trade? It spotted the Montreal Protocol and did not like that. It did not like the Basel Convention, which allows trade sanctions, or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES.
We already had a number of agreements that said we were allowed to take measures to protect the environment and in those agreements, we said trade could not get in the way. The trade Hydra raised its many ugly heads and said, no, it did not want us to do that.
There was never any decision, by the way. There was no ruling. It was just a matter of, in every national capital all around the world, the powerful trade ministers at every cabinet table turning to their less powerful environment ministers and saying they could not use those tools anymore. As a result, not a single climate agreement that Canada has ever signed has had any sanctions at all. The only sanction in the Paris Agreement is essentially the annual global stock-taking of language. That is coming up at COP28. The global stock-taking is essentially a sanction based on global shaming and embarrassment as there is no sanction there at all.
We really need to deal with this. Although the window here with the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement is pretty well closed because the negotiations are done, let us take this moment to say this is wrong. Certainly, President Zelenskyy of Ukraine has been one of the most outspoken champions. The war that Putin launched illegally against Ukraine must not get in the way of climate action. President Zelenskyy knows it and champions it. This is a good time to make sure all of the climate agreements are protected from trade limitations.
This is a good time to dust off some of the decisions that have been wrongly assumed to say that we cannot pursue climate agreements without violating trade deals. For instance, there are the tuna-dolphin case and the shrimp-turtle case. Both of those cases, at the WTO appellate level, left out very clear language. It does not say that we can never protect the environment under the WTO but that we cannot do it one-on-one. We cannot say the U.S. makes its own rules and then tells Mexico what to do.
However, it did say, in the context of a multilateral agreement that is negotiated, that trade has to back off and to respect those commitments. That is the case with the Paris Agreement. Every country on earth is bound by it. It is a perfect opportunity for our government to step up and to start saying that countries cannot use trade agreements to limit action to protect climate, as has been done. There are sanctions against India for moving to renewable energy, and so on. We recently had another investor protection agreement decision that hampers climate action.
To go back, trade deals are different from investor protection agreements, but in Bill C-57, in the existing Canada-Ukraine trade deal, there is an investor protection agreement. Those are very corrosive of democracy in that they say a foreign corporation has a right to sue a government if it does not like something that a government does that reduces its expectation of profits. Our government got rid of it in negotiating for the new CUSMA with the U.S., so what was chapter 11 of NAFTA is now gone.
We should be moving quickly to remove investor protection agreements that undermine our democracy, our environmental protections and our labour protections. Getting rid of investor protection agreements, or at least ensuring that they do not give foreign corporations more rights than domestic corporations, would be very welcome, indeed.
Bill C-57 as an improvement in modernization of the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement is fine as far as it goes, but it would not do the things that many Liberal MPs have said it would. They have not been misleading the House, as they absolutely believe to be true that the Canada-Ukraine agreement as reflected in Bill C-57 would modernize and include more protections to the environment. It would not really, because unless we get at the basic conflict that trade agreements and the WTO have set themselves up to be superior to multilateral environmental agreements, like the Paris agreement, we are always at risk of trade deals and trade decisions from bodies like the World Trade Organization undermining and sabotaging global climate efforts.
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Madam Speaker, I would agree with the parliamentary secretary. There is language about climate. There is language about labour rights and language about indigenous rights. The difficulty here is that we can put in all the language and pretty words we like, but if the effect of the supremacy of trade deals and the World Trade Organization remains untouched, then anything we put in pretty words is undercut by the effective hard impacts. It is like having a set of really sharp scissors that cut through that paper. We do not really make the progress we think we are making by just saying we care about climate. However, if there is going to be an investor protection agreement that says, “I do not like the decision someone just made” to the government of international agreements that makes sure we start changing technologies and moving toward renewable and so on, the ability of a foreign corporation to sue over that undercuts the pretty words. That would be the point.
I will say to the hon. parliamentary secretary—
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Madam Speaker, in the generic category of investor protection agreements that damage Canada's sovereignty, I would point more to what used to be called NAFTA, where we had decisions taken by Parliament that were reversed because of complaints by U.S.-based corporations. Canada has lost out over and over again in those agreements. In the case of the one with FIPA and China, since all those decisions are secret, we do not know how often it has been used to challenge.
I think the hon. member for Abbotsford knows that the answer is that I cannot think of a time the Canada-Ukraine agreement has been used in ways that preferred Ukrainian corporations over the Government of Canada. However, the reality of investor protection agreements is that, in the context with a bigger power, the Canadian companies have lost out in U.S. challenges under arbitration, as Canadian governments have lost out when U.S. corporations challenge us. It is a consistent thing through investor protection agreements that the larger economic power, whether it is the investor or the nation state, whichever is the larger—
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Madam Speaker, as ever, the member for Elmwood—Transcona is brilliant and absolutely right. There is a chilling effect. When the Government of Canada acts to ban a toxic substance, as it did to ban a gasoline additive called MMT, it is found to be very bad and naughty, and it has its hand slapped. By the way, this was because the Chrétien government decided to settle this before there was a decision on MMT. This had the effect that the people at Environment Canada, who thought this had better be banned because it is a neurotoxin already affecting the health of Canadians, got sanctioned. The money that was paid out to Ethyl Corporation, in that case, came out of the core A-base budget of Environment Canada.
There is a real chilling effect every single time Canada, the sovereign state, takes a measure for the environment or human health and gets told that it was bad to do it because a foreign corporation did not like it. It is—
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