- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed my colleague's speech.
She was critical of the FIPA, the investment treaty, that Canada signed with China, but the 1994 FIPA, or investment treaty, with Ukraine and this new modernized free trade agreement with Ukraine both contain similar provisions.
I am wondering if she is going to be encouraging her colleagues in the NDP to strip the Ukraine trade agreement of these provisions or if she is supportive of including those kinds of investment protections in this new free trade agreement with Ukraine.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not going to go into the revisionist history that my colleague recited here in this House. He should know that as the minister who was responsible for negotiating the original Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, I would be supportive of any reasonable steps we can take to improve our economic relationship with Ukraine and help it up on its feet.
My question for the member has to do with liquefied natural gas. As he knows, Ukraine has an energy security problem because it can no longer get natural gas from Russia. The obvious place for Ukraine to turn to is Canada, and yet our Prime Minister has said that there is no business case to be made for exporting LNG. Does my colleague actually support the moral case for Canada exporting its LNG to Ukraine to help Ukraine with its energy security challenge?
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Mr. Speaker, I very much enjoyed my colleague's speech. Like him, I am a Mennonite with family that immigrated from Ukraine. There are many within our Conservative caucus who have Ukrainian roots and take great interest not only in the terrible situation Ukraine finds itself in right now, with the war and invasion by Russia, but also in the many Ukrainians who have been displaced, found their way to Canada and are here as refugees.
Could the member comment a bit on the Ukrainians who are settling in his area of Canada? How are they being received, and how are they doing right now?
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Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech. However, it did concern me that he was somewhat disparaging toward our oil and gas industry. The member accused some in this House of scoring cheap political points, but when one does that, one had better not be guilty of doing the very same thing; unfortunately, he is the guilty one here.
Natural gas is one of the solutions to the world's greenhouse gas emissions challenges. We can displace dirty coal elsewhere around the world by exporting much cleaner natural gas to those countries. There is some urgency in doing this for Ukraine. Does the member not believe that Canada should put in place every single strategy available to us in order to get our liquefied natural gas to a country like Ukraine, which is in such deep straits and turmoil because of Russia's invasion? Does he not agree that this is an urgent situation where we should be providing—
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Madam Speaker, the member spent a lot of time talking about investor protections, and she suggested that foreign investment protection promotion agreements are corrosive to democracy and to how we represent Canada's sovereignty at home and abroad. However, I would ask her a question. There has been an investor protection agreement in place with Ukraine since 1994, for 30 years. Can she point out one or two cases under those provisions that have resulted in Canada's sovereignty's being impaired?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's comments about the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement. He mentioned that MCC is very active in Abbotsford in helping refugees from Ukraine settle in our beautiful community. I would invite him to expand on that.
Where have they settled? How are they integrating into our community?
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Mr. Speaker, I just following up on the previous question from my NDP colleague, who has suggested time and time again that Canada has a free trade agreement with China. That is patently false, and I think he knows that. What he is actually referring to is a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement, or FIPA.
I would ask the member, who just gave a very good speech on Ukraine, if it is her understanding that Canada has gone so far as to sign a trade agreement with China and why it is that Ukraine is the priority right now when it comes to negotiating free trade.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the major challenges facing Ukraine is energy security. Ukraine formerly depended on Russia for its natural gas supplies, and of course that opportunity has quickly evaporated.
Canada stands in a perfect position to sell natural gas to Ukraine. Unfortunately, our current government has been very reluctant to promote the sale of liquefied natural gas to the rest of the world, claiming that there is no business case to be made for it. However, now we have an opportunity within the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement to perhaps find a way of getting our natural gas to Ukraine and providing them with energy security. What component of this agreement, if any, would expedite and assist Canadian companies to export liquefied natural gas to Ukraine?
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Mr. Speaker, as members know, free trade is very close and dear to my heart.
I want to ask the member about his own Ukrainian community, the diaspora that is gathered within his community and why they would feel that this agreement is really important to Canada. I would welcome his thoughts on that.
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Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is right that the most effective way of speaking to the institutional capacity of countries that are struggling, that are perhaps coming out of troubled histories, is to engage with them on trade. As we do so, it opens up opportunities to speak to their democratic institutions, law enforcement institutions and human rights. It is all based on developing trust. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that Canada remain engaged.
The negotiation of trade agreements is, of course, at its heart, about our Canadian economic interests. However, it is amazing how these negotiations open up these opportunities to help countries such as Ukraine, Colombia and Peru to emerge from their difficult histories and start to develop strong, democratic institutions.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly cannot speak for the Liberal Party. What I can say is that free trade agreements are always brought to the House for discussion and full debate, as we are having today, and then those agreements have to be ratified by the House. If they are not ratified, it is a big problem because the government cannot move forward with implementing them.
I do not know if the member has a misunderstanding of the process required to get free trade agreements in place and implemented, but I do know that robust discussions take place in this House and have taken place in this House for many years, starting with the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, which was the first major trade agreement Canada ever had. It morphed into NAFTA, which is now called CUSMA. Since that time, Canada has negotiated trade agreements with a total of 51 countries. It has opened up new trade access for Canadian businesses to export and to have the opportunity to grow.
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Mr. Speaker, I am chuckling a bit because the member talked about a trade agreement. What Canada signed with China was not a trade agreement; it was an investment protection agreement. The purpose of that agreement was to protect Canadian investors when they invest in China, because China does not respect the rule of law the way we do in Canada.
We worked very hard for many, many years to get that agreement in place because we had identified situations where Canadian companies had made significant investments in China. One example was gold mining. After the prospecting was done and after a very productive deposit was found, guess what happened. The Chinese government stepped up and said it wanted to have Chinese businesses develop the mine and take the profits out of it. That is why we needed an investment protection agreement. It is not a trade access agreement. It does not provide new access to Canada for China to trade. It protects Canadians when they do business in China.
I encourage the member to please get his facts right and make sure he understands the agreements that Canada is signing.
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Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to this implementation bill for the modernization of the Ukraine free trade agreement.
I always welcome opportunities to talk about trade. It is one of my passions, which is why I was somewhat disappointed by the disparaging remarks made by my colleague from Winnipeg North regarding the previous Conservative government's record on trade, especially Stephen Harper's focus on trade as the linchpin of Canada's economic strategy.
During the Harper years, the government set an unprecedented pace for negotiating trade agreements. When the Conservative government was first elected back in 2006, Canada had trade agreements with five countries: the United States, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Israel. By the time we were finished some nine years later, we had free trade agreements with 47 additional countries, an astounding number. That included the Canada-Europe free trade agreement. It included the TPP, which morphed, of course, into the CPTPP. It also included South Korea, which was a very difficult negotiation but was successfully concluded.
One of the agreements that former prime minister Stephen Harper really wanted to get done was between Canada and Ukraine. Even back in 2010, Ukraine was facing difficult challenges. It had a very weak economy and was struggling in trying to deal with Russia. The Prime Minister at the time, Stephen Harper, said the government was going to negotiate a trade agreement with Ukraine that would be unique in that the outcome would be asymmetrical. What that meant is that the benefits flowing each way were not necessarily going to be equal or balanced, at least at the beginning. The phasing in of market access and the elimination of tariff barriers would be done on a differentiated basis so that the outcome was not a quid pro quo in the perfect sense of the term. The Conservatives did that because we wanted to give Ukraine a leg up and help Ukraine re-establish itself as economically viable and strong.
I should indicate that I will be splitting my time with the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.
When the former Conservative government negotiated the trade agreement, the negotiations started in 2010 and were concluded in 2015. We left office in 2015. These agreements sometimes take a number of years to come into force, so the agreement came into force in 2017 and has served Ukraine well. Our trade with that country has increased. It was not completely unexpected that when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, trade flows declined. In fact, the current government and Ukraine stopped negotiating for a while because of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and made sense out of the fact that Ukraine still needed to move forward economically and put in place the economic structures that would allow it to be successful. Negotiations were then recommenced in 2022, and here we are, a year later, in a position to pass the implementing legislation.
The purpose of modernizing this free trade agreement is that the free trade environment around the world, the playing field, is evolving rapidly. Some things are happening that are not necessarily good. For example, the world is becoming more protectionist. We are putting up more and more tariff and non-tariff barriers.
The United States, under Donald Trump, turned inward. In fact, members may recall that it was former president Donald Trump who pulled the U.S. out of the TPP negotiations. Why? I do not know. He was running for office. I suppose he saw it as politically beneficial.
The whole premise for the TPP was to take advantage of what is called comparative advantage. Every country has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to manufacturing goods and delivering services. If we can take the strengths of each country and cobble them together into a coherent trade strategy, we can ensure that the outcome for partner countries is optimal.
Unfortunately, the United States has pulled out, and since that time, it has really turned inward. It is not negotiating free trade agreements. When we go to the World Trade Organization, we notice that large countries, such as Brazil, China, South Africa and India, often block consensus on trade liberalization.
This causes us to reconsider how we engage with the world and open up new opportunities for Canadian companies to do business abroad and expand exports. That is why this agreement with Ukraine, which was negotiated under the former Conservative government led by Stephen Harper, is now being modernized. Many of these factors that were not in play back when we first negotiated this agreement now call for us to update the agreement and modernize it.
For example, there are 11 new chapters included in this agreement. There is a chapter on cross-border trade in services. There is a chapter on investment, which is very important. There is a chapter on temporary entry for business purposes, to facilitate the travel of business people back and forth between our countries. Financial services are covered, as is telecommunications. There is a chapter on small and medium-sized enterprises.
There is also a chapter on digital trade, because digital trade has evolved so quickly that it has left a lot of our trade agreements behind. One of the reasons that our free trade agreement with the United States was updated is that we had no chapter on digital services. People are doing business online now. Amazon has become an obscenely profitable company. Why? It is because of online purchasing, which is digital trade. There is a separate chapter on that.
There is a new chapter on how labour and workers will be treated, and the high standards that both countries want to set. There is also a chapter on the environment.
The bottom line is this: We as Canadians need to step up and stand in the gap for Ukraine. Canada has a large Ukrainian diaspora that expects us to partner with Ukraine in its time of need. That is what this agreement does. That is what the original trade agreement did.
In my home city of Abbotsford, many Ukrainians have fled their home country and made their home, or at least their temporary home, in Abbotsford. We now have something called the Ukrainian village, which is reinforcing why it is so important for all of us to work together with our Ukrainian diaspora and with the people of Ukraine to put in place a trade agreement and structure under which the Ukrainian economy can be lifted back up. Both of our countries can benefit from that.
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- Dec/1/21 7:51:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think the member is rewriting history. I was there, as he was, but I was on the government side. I have reviewed that agreement very carefully, and I was responsible for renegotiating or extending it for two years when it expired.
First, the lumber industry across Canada embraced this agreement. It saw it as the best outcome it could hope for given U.S. intransigence. Second, on the $1 billion, again, the member does not recall this quite correctly. Half of the money went to the American industry and the other half went into a shared fund that was used jointly by Canada and the United States to promote the lumber industry. It was $500 million for that jointly administered fund, and then another $4.5 billion for Canadian producers. I see that as a good-news story.
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- Dec/1/21 7:47:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not know if the member recalls that back when the softwood lumber agreement was negotiated and settled under a previous Conservative government, every softwood lumber province across the country had agreed with it. All producers across the country were onside. Industry was onside. Governments were onside. This was a big win for Canada.
Can members imagine $4.5 billion U.S.? The equivalent of that today is $6 billion and it came back to our producers. Instead of the government keeping that money, which I am sure the Liberals would have done, we as the Conservatives said that the rightful owners of that refund were the producers themselves. The member should be celebrating that victory rather than scolding us.
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- Dec/1/21 7:46:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is very easy to answer that. The softwood agreement expired shortly before the election. It was in October 2015 that it expired. In fact, our Liberal friends across the way were making all kinds of promises about how they would extend and renew the agreement. They said they had a much better relationship with the United States. Today we know that was all bunkum. It was all a fabrication. The Liberals had no relationship with the United States.
Today we know our relationship with the United States is a failed relationship under the current Liberal government. It is sad to see when we think that under Stephen Harper we had such a strong relationship. Now, under three successive presidents of the United States, the Prime Minister has been unable to achieve anything on the bilateral trade front.
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- Dec/1/21 7:39:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Nose Hill.
I would like to provide the counterpoint to what we have just heard from the Liberal side, because we have to distinguish fiction from fact. The truth is, there is a long history to this dispute, going way back to at least 1982. It was a Liberal government under Paul Martin that finally tried to bring peace to the woods. This was called the war of the woods because we had ongoing battles between the United States and Canada on the softwood lumber issue. Unfortunately, Paul Martin failed to get a deal done, to get peace in the woods. His trade minister, Jim Peterson, failed to get an agreement for Canadians.
Then we had an election in 2006. Stephen Harper was elected prime minister of our country and he did something remarkable. He reached across the aisle and asked David Emerson to cross the floor and join his cabinet. He had one main task, and that was to resolve the lumber dispute. David Emerson had deep roots in the softwood lumber industry. He knew it well. Stephen Harper knew that David Emerson could get the deal done, and guess what? He did it successfully.
In fact, he was remarkably successful. He negotiated a seven-year softwood lumber agreement and bought peace for seven years. He also negotiated a potential two-year extension. On top of that, he negotiated a $4.5-billion U.S. repayment to Canada that went back to the softwood lumber producers in Canada. It was a big win for Canada. It was a big win for the Conservative government under Stephen Harper because it brought us that peace we needed in the woods.
That softwood lumber agreement needed to be ratified in the House through a ways and means motion, and guess what? The Liberals voted against it in 2006. Only one Liberal voted in favour of it: Joe Comuzzi. He boldly stood up against the duplicity of the Liberals at the time. We later ended up renewing that agreement, so we had a total of nine years of peace between Canada and the United States.
Today we find ourselves in a situation. For the last six years, the Liberal government, the finance minister and the Prime Minister have been continually promising to resolve this dispute.
In fact, I have here a CBC article going back to March 12, 2016. The headline is “[Canada's trade minister] heralds ‘real breakthrough’ on softwood lumber negotiations”. That was six years ago. That trade minister was quoted as saying, “We have now managed to get the Americans to the table, we have managed to raise attention to this issue at the very highest levels.” She went on to say, “I don't want to downplay to anyone the complexity—the fiendish complexity—of the softwood lumber issue [but] this was a real breakthrough.” That was six years ago. What happened to that breakthrough?
Time after time, when we ask questions in the House about how those negotiations are going, we are told we are going to get a deal, yet it has been six years. That, by any definition, is failure, especially when we compare it to the standard the Harper government set in negotiating nine years of peace in the woods. For six years we have had a war in the woods and that war continues. In fact, today we are in a situation where the U.S. has doubled tariffs on softwood lumber exports from Canada.
Shame on the government. Shame on the Prime Minister. Shame on the finance minister, who was trade minister when she made those bold statements. I know we can do better and Canadians deserve better.
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