FAIT Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET DU COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, March 27, 2001

• 0907

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Bill Graham (Toronto Centre—Rosedale, Lib.)): I'll now call this meeting to order.

Colleagues, I'd like to try to get some business done before we start with the panel, but I don't want to spend a long time on it, so I want to get a sense from you of whether this is going to take a long time. If it will, we're not going to do it.

Mr. Harb is here, and as you know, his subcommittee is studying the issue of softwood lumber and has had recent hearings. They want to do a letter to Minister Pettigrew and also to Mr. Zoellick.

I understand, Mr. Harb, that in fact all the parties that sit on the committee are entirely in favour of this letter. You're asking the ratification of this committee, but we can't reinvent it. It's a subject you've discussed at the committee, and you have the support of the committee members for it.

So I wonder, colleagues, if we could agree to support Mr. Harb.

Mr. Gary Lunn (Saanich—Gulf Islands, Canadian Alliance): I'll make a motion.

The Chair: Would you, Mr. Lunn? I appreciate that.

[Translation]

Ms. Lalonde, do you have a question?

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ): [Editor's Note: Inaudible]... of the subcommittee have read the letter?

The Chair: Yes. It was sent yesterday.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Are they in agreement?

The Chair: They agreed on the substance, perhaps not on every word, but they all voted in favour of the letter and its contents. Perhaps we could, as we usually do, give the committee chair leave to correct the terms, the text, etc., along with the other members, if necessary. Does everyone agree with that?

[English]

Mr. Harb, is that all right, if we leave it with you to make any quick, minor changes with members of the committee?

Are you all right with that?

Mr. Gary Lunn: Yes, absolutely. There might be some editing issues, but we'll deal with that.

The Chair: Okay, colleagues. Then what about Mr. Zoellick's letter? Do we have to worry about that one?

Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre, Lib.): It's the same thing. If we can approve it in principle, with minor—

Mr. Gary Lunn: It's the same motion.

The Chair: It's the same motion from Mr. Lunn, with any adjustments that need to be made among the committee members.

Thank you very much, colleagues. I appreciate that.

Mr. Harb, thank you very much. If you can solve softwood lumber, you'll go down in history as the greatest parliamentarian ever. We'll turn you into a tree, and if you don't solve it, we're going to reduce you into pulp, like pulp fiction.

• 0910

We have an important panel here this morning, colleagues, to continue our study into the summit of the Americas. I'm just going to take everybody the way they're listed on the order paper.

[Translation]

I would ask Professor Brunelle to begin.

Professor Brunelle, thank you for appearing before the committee.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle (Professor of Sociology, Université du Québec à Montréal and member of the Groupe de recherche sur l'intégration continentale de l'UQAM): You are asking me to break the ice, if I understand correctly.

The Chair: That's right, but only the ice, please. Unfortunately, we still have ice here in Ottawa.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: How much time do I have?

The Chair: Between 10 and 15 minutes, so that we will have time for questions.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: I would like to deal with three dimensions of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, but before I begin, Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you and thank the committee for inviting me.

I am wearing two hats today, because I am both in charge of research for the Groupe de recherche sur l'intégration continentale and particularly, this morning, because of my participation in the Réseau québécois sur l'intégration continentale. The research group is a founding member of the network and, as you know, the network is a joint organizer, along with Common Frontiers, of the Second Peoples' Summit of the Americas, to be held in Quebec City next April 16 to 21, immediately before and at the beginning of the Third Summit of the Americas.

There are, therefore, three aspects: the democratic element of the negotiation, the role played by social movements and, finally, a few thoughts that I would like to share with you.

The expression “democratic deficit” is becoming more and more widespread in defining the negotiation process itself, as well as to explain, and I will emphasize this a little later, the implementation process of the free trade agreements.

Parliamentarians are making more frequent use of the concept of a democratic deficit. The term was used in the debates within the Americas Conference of Parliamentarians. The situation is becoming more and more enigmatic, Mr. Chairman, since, at a time when there is more and more information and when citizens are much more aware, for something as important as the free trade negotiations and in particular the Free Trade Area of the Americas, there is no information and we have been left totally in the dark.

This is a problem that we must tackle. We can no longer allow the executive committees to set in place such important frameworks, in the name of democracy, without informing the population and without allowing any debates on these issues. I feel that secrecy, at this point in time, has a perverse effect on both the civil society and parliamentarians as well, as they are completely removed from the slightest bit of information about what is happening.

I think it would cause much less of a disturbance within the civil society, at this time, if, somewhere, there were an open debate on these issues. I will come back to that later.

It is not normal that, on issues of such importance, the population should be so concerned about determining whether or not the negotiations will deal with matters such as education, health, and to what extent the agreements will or will not affect the standards that apply in the federal and provincial context, in Canada, with respect to the environment, wages, economic and social law. These are central issues that are gaining in importance among people, and I see this every day, in all of the presentations, the conferences, the debates, in all of the information that is made available at all levels.

It seems to me that what is at stake with executive democracy affects first and foremost the legislators. One of the questions we must ask is whether or not there is a decline in parliamentarism, at the present time, both in Canada as well as in the Americas, in particular with respect to matters involving free trade.

The proof lies in the fact that there is a greater tolerance on one side of the fence—and this is not a metaphor—whereas there is less tolerance on the other: that the secrecy of the negotiations, the clandestine nature of the negotiations, be broken through an ever greater collusion amongst the heads of State and heads of business.

I think this comes very close to being indecent, Mr. Chairman, and we have to break away from this spiral of closed doors and collusion amongst big business and executive powers so as to rebuild the bridges with the greater population, and even with parliamentarians.

I feel that this is a contentious issue, which brings me to the second part of my brief.

• 0915

I will now deal with the social movements. We now know, since Seattle, that the civil society feels very strongly about globalization, but let us be more specific with respect to the unbridled liberalization of the markets, of all markets.

We were struck, of course, by the violence in Seattle, but a thorough analysis of the event has not been made, by that, I mean, the incredible mobilization of an ever-growing group of social and economic organizations around these issues.

Therefore, either we continue and stand firm on this infernal logic of selectiveness, of closed doors, or we open up and build bridges.

The executives are very much aware of the problem. At this time, within the civil society, there are those who feel very strongly about certain issues and, technically speaking, have transnationalized their actions in the same way as have the multinationals or the transnational corporations. There are some well-known examples: Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc. Moreover, the union movement is becoming more and more transnational. The old international relationships, be it the ICFTU or the ORIT are becoming closer, and much more emphatic on the issue of the Americas, particularly now.

There are also other parties emerging and asking questions in good faith. This applies to the women's movement. We saw it with the World March of Women, last October. This applies to the environmental movement. This is so true that the executives themselves built a bridge, so that more and more frequently, in civil society, we now have not only NGOs, non-government organizations, but also TGOs, true government organizations, that are funded by the executives and serve to establish a dialogue with the civil society.

I think that in all of this confusion, it is time to try and open the doors and link the political class in its entirety with civil societies, these groups that, in good faith, are trying to make themselves heard on the issue of the Americas.

When we see the privileged position granted the business associations, and in particular the Americas Business Forum, in this entire process, this is something completely asymmetrical and increasingly unacceptable.

I would like to close by dealing with something totally different and try, since I am speaking to parliamentarians, to express a few ideas on the Americanness that we are together trying to create.

The idea is perhaps to try to avoid concentrating all of our attention on the mercenary dimension of our relationship with the Americas. Trade is all well and good, and it is something we all want. We all want more products, but we are not only consumers, and our counterparts in Latin America are not only consumers either. This dimension is an important one.

We are surrounded by negotiating specialists who continue to negotiate. But what is intolerable is the fact that everything is essentially one-dimensional. We can only see the Americas as they relate to trade, mercantilism, investment, exploitation. If we were to list the other dimensions of the Americas, where would Canada fit in? Could Canada's vision not be loftier than its Johnny-come- lately participation in these Americas?

That is the challenge that we face. That is perhaps what we should move toward. We should strive for this loftier vision, move towards a more unified way of seeing them, question the useful or harmful effects of the agreements that we have signed, examine other commitments that have been made but not followed up; instead of giving development aid, we should have a vision that is much closer to what some Europeans did after the war, which allowed some European countries to join the group of most developed countries in Europe. An example would be Greece, or Ireland that were, some 20 or 30 years ago, considered under-developed and that are, at this time, in a very honourable economic position. Why not have in the Americas, since the relative positions of the partners is asymmetrical, a vision that is as strong, that is as laudable?

I might remind you that amongst those who will be negotiating in Quebec City next April, there will be, of course, the four main partners in the Americas, the United States, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, which represent 75%, 6%, 5% and 4% respectively of the total wealth of the Americas, which means, because I rounded off the percentages, that more than 92% of the economic clout in the Americas is concentrated in these four countries. That leaves about 8.2% for the other 31 countries. And the two poorest countries in the Americas, Nicaragua and Haiti, together represent 1/2,000th of the wealth in the Americas.

• 0920

Can we move these countries closer to the head of the line? Is there some other way of thinking? It is obvious that a free trade agreement that does not provide for any type of adaptive measures, that offers no safety net, cannot help these countries, just as if we have no safety net here, we will not be able to grasp all of the beneficial effects.

I might remind you, in closing, that the only country in the Americas that provided for adaptive measures for its manpower affected by NAFTA is the United States, which is often called a country where the strongest liberalism is allowed, even though that had been promised by your political opponents, the Conservatives. When they negotiated the Free Trade Agreement, they had promised such support, adaptive, and transitional measures.

I believe I have run out of time. In closing, I would like to say one more thing. Mr. Chairman, I have found, and I take this opportunity to state it publicly, that our government's attitude to COPA is absolutely deplorable. I think that the COPA initiative, even if it comes from Quebec—and there are some interesting things that come from Quebec, Mr. Chairman, and perhaps we should chase this scarecrow away from certain minds in Ottawa—was a brilliant idea. It shows a great deal of vision, Mr. Chairman. It is not solely the product of the National Assembly in Quebec. It's an idea that began in the minds of some parliamentarians from the United States. In fact, it has deep roots in the United States. I think that the idea, aside from any political trend, to have pluralism and concurrent discussions, as the English say, at the federal, the central, and infrastate levels, with the 164 governments, states, or provinces in the Americas, as well as supranational parliaments, is a very rich, very important idea that should be supported by Canada, regardless of what others elsewhere in the Americas might think.

I find that our government's strategy, Mr. Chairman, as it wants to launch this FIPA, or Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas, which is pure sham, which has been lingering on paper for the past three years, without anything useful being done, should be thrown into the rubbish bin. Rather, we should come back to the idea of a COPA, or Parliamentary Conference of the Americas, which is an excellent idea, and we could try to convince the heads of State, as was requested, to receive representatives of the COPA at the Quebec Summit next month. I think that this would be a useful and important gesture. It would not remedy the democratic deficit nor the caricature of negotiations that will take place in Quebec, but it just might show a little goodwill in a situation that could deteriorate.

You can imagine, Mr. Chairman, and these are my last words, that if the situation in Quebec ever deteriorated, it would be a very sad thing for this democracy of executives. It is hard to imagine how high the fences will have to be next time and what level of security will have to be implemented to avoid similar scenarios in the future. Thus, I think that it is urgent for both sides to try to tear down this fence, to make the procedure more open, to try to inform people about what is going on and to let the people debate the issue.

I've already said three times that I am about to finish. I will finally do so. If I dare say, Mr. Chairman...

The Chair: This is a very smart technique.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: ... that the help or lack of help we had from the federal government to organize the Peoples Summit is disgraceful. It is disgraceful to spend 70 million dollars on security to organize this kind of show, namely the clandestine negotiations in Quebec while only crumbs are left to organize a Peoples' Summit of the Americas. We have decried this situation several times. We complained to Mr. Lortie. We complained to Mr. Pettigrew and to Mr. Manley. Now, in desperation, Mr. Chairman, I make a final tragic plea today to give more funds to this Peoples' Summit.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you. I have two technical questions. What does TGO mean?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: I invented this term, Mr. Chairman, to refer to true government organizations...

The Chair: Very well.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: ... which are organized by executives in order to address civil society.

The Chair: Organizations...?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: True government organizations.

The Chair: In your mind, is the Americas Business Forum such an organization?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: I leave it up to you to judge, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: All right. And what about another word: américanité?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Américanité.

• 0925

The Chair: Does this mean americanization in English?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: No, on the contrary, Mr. Chairman. In French, there is an important distinction to be made between americanization, or “coca-colonization”, and américanité, which is a more powerful vision, more Bolivarian, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: All right. So, américanité is a good thing and “coca-colonization”, is bad. Is that what you mean?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: It depends on the day. If the weather is hot, it's good.

The Chair: We have understood.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: When it is hot, it is very good.

The Chair: We'll come back to the FIPA. Mr. Brunelle, perhaps you know that I am President of the FIPA. Therefore I'll give your words all the value I believe they have.

[English]

Now it's Professor Hart. Professor Hart, thank you once again for coming before the committee.

Mr. Michael Hart (Norman Patterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University): Thank you very much, Chairman.

Let me give you now a slightly different perspective.

The Chair: I wouldn't have believed that.

Mr. Michael Hart: Neither would I.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

The Chair: You start by surprising us.

[Translation]

Mr. Michael Hart: Why, yes.

[English]

I come here from the perspective both of someone who's now teaching this material at Carleton University but who also spent 22 years being one of these people who negotiated these kinds of agreements in secret and foisted them on the people of Canada and the world.

I thought I would take this opportunity to speak to two issues: one, the issue of secrecy, and secondly, the issue of the availability of the text, and give a little bit of perspective on what's real and what's not real.

Let me begin with a screaming headline in the Post last Friday that announced on the business pages that Canada and the United States were in secret talks on softwood lumber. This certainly had the impact the headline writer wanted: it piqued my interest. So I read the first paragraph of the story, a breathless story by Peter Morton, who, as most of you know, usually gets things at least 50% wrong. Peter started off by telling us that Canada and the United States were engaged in secret talks, so the headline writer had gotten it from the writer.

I thought, that's interesting, I wonder how he found out about these secret talks. We find out in the second paragraph. He found out because both sides had issued press releases and had press conferences announcing that they'd had these talks and indicating what they had talked about in some detail, and indicating that these were very preliminary discussions to see if there was a basis for finding a solution to a problem that I understand some of the members of this committee are also wresting with, one that's been with us since 1854, I think. So it's not a new problem, but a very thorny one.

What the headline writer and Peter Morton really meant is that there were private talks—they were not secret talks, they were private talks—between the governments on an issue. They're perfectly prepared to share with the people what they're talking about, but they're not inviting Peter Morton and his colleagues into the room while they have these discussions. Why? Because if they're ever going to have any progress on this very thorny issue I think they need some room in order to show some creativity.

It's a typical example of what has become an attitude in the press and in other organizations that everything that goes on behind closed doors is secret and somehow suspect. What they really mean is that they lack the expertise to understand the very complicated issues that are being discussed there.

I think it is important for parliamentarians to distinguish between secrecy and expertise. There is really no secrecy to these ongoing talks, but there is a certain level of expertise required.

I'll give you an illustration of why a little bit of expertise is very helpful. In my classes at Carleton I use a lot of simulations as a teaching technique. This is a technique I could not have used ten years ago because I think it would have been very difficult for the students to get the kind of information they need in order to do an effective job. But over the last three weeks we have done a number of simulations that require them to use the Internet. I'm amazed at the amount of information my students are able to find out. Last week they did a simulation of a WTO working party meeting examining the trade policies of Paraguay, which is not exactly an easy country to find information out about, not exactly an easy country to pigeonhole. They had everything they needed, all of it, downloaded from the Internet.

What distinguished these students from some of the otherswho I met with is that they had developed a certain degree of expertise, which they had gained by reading a number of books, attending lectures, thinking these things through, and therefore they showed a fairly wide understanding of issues that are not secret but which do require that level of expertise.

I think that explains, in part, the reluctance on the part of governments to release the so-called text.

• 0930

I made some inquiries before coming in here to see what the state of that text is. I learned that it's 900 pages long. That's a very long text. What this means to me is that it isn't a negotiating text. It is a text that's been cobbled together out of the various desires, interests, and so on of the 34 member countries without any kind of differentiation as to how real things are, and it includes stuff that will never be part of the final text. In fact, I had one official tell me that if they went to work and really edited this text, it would be down to three pages, because there's so much repetition, so much confusion, so much overlap and so on in this text that it would be a very unhelpful text to put forward.

There's a more fundamental point about the unhelpfulness of this kind of text; that is, that they have not yet reached the stage of negotiations. So what you're seeing here is not a negotiating text that's being talked about, but a text that is helping some officials begin to organize their thoughts. That kind of text I think would be a very unhelpful text if it were put out for public viewing because it would create all kinds of confusion. It would set all kinds of hares running and so on, and it would create a huge job to try to contain that.

Let me just give you a few examples from my own experience about texts and their role in this kind of process. First of all, these texts have become more complicated over the years. If you want a really simple free trade text, you go back to the 1854 Elgin-Marcy treaty between Canada and the United States, which consists of six articles, only one of which has to do with trade. That one article is three lines long and appended to it are 28 items that are covered by the agreement. That's it. That's the full extent of the free trade agreement between Canada and the United States in 1854.

You then go to this thing here, the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated in the early 1990s, and it's impossible to tell how long it is because of the number of annexes and so on. Mr. MacKay, who was one of the draftsmen of the text, informs me it's 1,700 pages, but you append to that another 10,000 pages or so of annexes setting out the tariff concessions. So it's a very long text. Why is it long? Because of the fertile imagination of parliamentarians in passing laws and regulations over the years that require the attention of negotiators when they're putting together a text that has some real meaning. So you go to these various kinds of extremes.

Similarly, this is the text of the Uruguay Round results, the WTO agreements, which is now 550 pages long, but appended to that are over 20,000 pages of schedules from the various member countries and their protocols of accession and so on for the 141 members of the WTO. Again, it's a very long text, not an easy text to understand because there are a lot of intricacies where you have to understand one part in order to understand the other part and so on. In other words, it requires expertise.

But these are texts that represent the results of a negotiation. They are not the early-stage texts representing early thinking. Early-thinking texts really are not very useful. Let me give you a couple of examples. When we were preparing for the Canada-United States negotiations, I was part of the task force doing the background thinking on that, and at one point I prepared a text of what a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement would likely involve. The purpose of that text was to inform the senior officials in my department and other departments of the kinds of issues that we needed to prepare for by showing them what a text would look like. That text has never seen the light of day, will never see the light day, because it was prepared on my personal computer and therefore is not in any files. It served its purpose and I then destroyed it.

Next, when we were negotiating the FTA, sometime in January of 1986 we were authorized to begin negotiating a text internally inside the Canadian negotiating team. And that text, if I recall, went through nine drafts. Its purpose was to help the Canadian negotiators think through their positions by looking at what the kinds of things they had responsibility to negotiate would look like in a completed text, to help them think through the relationship between the services chapter and the investment chapter, between the rules of origin chapter and the tariff chapter and so on. So we prepared a text for that purpose.

It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the final text. The text that was negotiated really began to be negotiated after the weekend in October when Canada and the United States agreed on what the free trade agreement would involve. We then had a text of about 30 pages and the legal team then spent the next ten weeks negotiating the text, which translated that 30-page political commitment into a text of 192 pages. And those 192 pages went through, if I recall, 12 drafts before we finished the final text, before we were agreed.

• 0935

Would it have been helpful to have had those texts available for wide public comment? I don't think so. I think that the fundamental political issue for the government was released in the text on October 4. The detailed drafting represented various ways for the legal team to think things through, in the same way that Parliament thinks things through at the caucus level on the various ways to interpret issues that are being put forward, before they are presented in public.

So I think this preoccupation with text and with secrecy is a large red herring. The real issue is what is the Government of Canada trying to do? What are the other 33 governments in the hemisphere trying to do? And what does it all mean?

I can tell you right now what they're trying to do. It's not a difficult proposition. They are trying to see whether or not it is possible to negotiate a trade agreement covering most of the countries of the hemisphere that goes beyond their current commitments in the WTO. So a good starting point for someone trying to understand what's going on is to first read this text called “The World Trade Organization Agreement”, because if there's going to be an agreement among these 34 countries, it will have to be this text and more. It will have to go beyond that particular thing. And none of them—not even Canada, not even the United States—has a position that clearly outlines at this stage what they are prepared to do that goes beyond their existing WTO obligations. This is why I'm of the view that we're at least five years away from any serious negotiations on the FTAA.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Five years away from beginning the serious negotiations, not from concluding them.

Mr. Michael Hart: From beginning serious negotiations.

The Chair: And I take it that the Brazilians would totally agree with you.

Mr. Michael Hart: Yes.

The Chair: That is the impression we have too. Okay, that was very helpful.

Perhaps I could interrupt for a small break—a head table break. I'd like to say that Jim Lee has come in and joined us. Jim was late coming in. He's usually here. He's our principal researcher, but he became a father yesterday, so we just want to congratulate him—a baby boy. He has a legitimate reason today. Usually he fathers our reports. He'll just have to stick to something more productive this time. We wish him well.

[Translation]

His wife is now a mother and he is a father.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: And he is very happy.

[English]

Ms. Colleen Beaumier (Brampton West—Mississauga, Lib.): Was it a boy baby or a girl baby?

The Chair: It's a boy.

So sorry, Ms. Robinson. I didn't mean to cut you off by introducing.... Welcome here from FOCAL.

Ms. Nobina Robinson (Executive Director, FOCAL): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'll make some brief general remarks about FOCAL and our interest and concerns about the summit process. I will share my time with my colleague Don MacKay, who's our special adviser on trade issues at FOCAL. Thank you for inviting us to share our thoughts and our concerns today.

The Canadian Foundation for the Americas, known as FOCAL, is an independent policy centre—you might say think-tank—dedicated to developing greater understanding about Canada's engagement with the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Our mission is to promote hemispheric cooperation and integration and to contribute to improved policy-making in Canada for the Americas, whether it be on foreign policy, development policy, or trade policy issues.

Our analysts, many of whom are here today, work with our vast and growing network of experts from all sectors. These include academe, private sector, the non-governmental sector, media and government, in Canada and throughout the hemisphere, to monitor political and economic developments and to learn about the emerging trends in the region.

We distributed our materials to each member of this committee last week, and today we have brought some very new publications to share with each of you. They're at the table right at the front. These publications are timed with the summit. Environment ministers of the hemisphere are meeting tomorrow in Montreal, and we have a policy paper on the environmental issues of the Americas, which we would like to share with you. We also have our last summit newsletter, which you've seen copies of, on the road to Quebec three weeks from now.

• 0940

As the Government of Canada has entered into this heightened pace of hemispheric activity since 1999 with more and more ministerial meetings being held in Canada and in the run-up to the summit, FOCAL too has been devoting considerable energy and effort to understanding and contributing ideas to the inter-American agenda.

We have taken advantage of every legitimate opening to civil society to make our positions clear on matters relating to the Organization of American States, the free trade area of the Americas, and the summit.

While others ahead of me today have jumped straight to the FTAA, my remarks will focus on the summit of the Americas as a whole, and I will leave some time for Mr. MacKay to address our specific positions on the FTAA.

The summit, in our view, is much more than the FTAA negotiations. I might add that I agree with Professor Hart that nothing is going to happen in Quebec with respect to concluding an FTAA, and that is vitally important.

I believe it is important for this committee to take the time to focus on the wider political context, such as troubles impending in Argentina, Paraguay, and Haiti, and to focus on the positive trends of this hemisphere, whether they be from Mexico or Chile, and to consider the non-trade agenda, which is urgent for countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

We also believe at FOCAL that with three short weeks left before the summit, we must try to deal with the vast array of misinformation—whether deliberate or unintended—that is abounding in Canada. For this we have produced our summit newsletter.

We do not see the summit as an end in itself, but rather another moment in the development of a community of the Americas. This community did not exist quite in this way only six years ago at the time of the first summit in Miami. What some called a mere photo opportunity at the time was the first meeting of leaders of the hemisphere since President Kennedy's time, and it is indeed astonishing that in such a short time since Miami we are now heading into a third occasion for dialogue and collective political will.

The summit process has provided the region with a framework to collectively pursue a vast array of cooperative initiatives, whether in the areas of anti-drug cooperation, anti-corruption convention, civilian supremacy over the military, or areas of utmost importance in the social agenda, such as health cooperation, education, or gender rights.

Summits also provide leaders with occasions to develop personal relationships and to address critical issues, whether related to financial crises or to the ongoing challenges of prosperity and equity in the hemisphere.

The increasing sectoral dialogues led by ministers of each government—justice, environment, finance, trade, and labour, to name a few—are indications that a community of the Americas is achievable, and are the principal building blocks for consensus-building and standard-setting in the hemisphere.

The summit commitments can also send a strong signal to national bureaucracies to overcome inertia and improve governance at the national level.

Of course, there are limits to what the summits can achieve, and this perhaps has not been made clear to the broader public. National governments still retain the primary responsibility of improving the lives of their citizens, and it is at the national level where several summit commitments have not been implemented. I'm thinking largely of the education commitments from the Santiago summit.

This in turn is giving rise to the public cynicism, which in its own way is fraying the at times fragile fabric of democracy in some countries of the hemisphere.

Given that we are only three weeks away from the major event in Quebec City, we at FOCAL are concerned about the following issues. I will list three before I conclude.

The Government of Canada's own handling of the summit process at home has not been ideal: the domestic jurisdictional fight with the Premier of Quebec, the mishandling of the ban on Brazilian beef, the emphasis on free trade instead of the non-trade-rich summit agenda, as well as the woefully inadequate consultation process conducted in Canada—frankly, even this set of hearings have come too late in the process to be of any real help to the summit process.

• 0945

All these developments have distracted attention from the real challenges, such as inequality, poverty, lack of accountability, and public insecurity, facing the citizens of the hemisphere—areas where we, in Canada, could have made more of a difference.

Given our own levels of prosperity and governance in Canada, the summit was not so much about improving Canadian governance or economic performance, but about addressing these challenges in meaningful ways for our partners in the hemisphere, whether in Guyana, Belize, or Paraguay. We fear the summit will be a lost opportunity for Canada to leave its mark on the hemisphere.

Surely Canada had more to offer the countries of the region than a simple “connectivity” agenda. We share the concerns voiced by so many groups that more could have been done on transparency and access factors. By this I mean that it is very difficult for us at FOCAL to comment positively on any summit action item, and I don't just mean the FTAA, when even the summit documents are not public.

Second, we continue to hope, however, that out of the Canadian summit can emerge a strong-language statement of support for a collective defence of representative democracy in the Americas; that it will foster strategies for inclusion of all sectors of society in public policy making; and that it will set new and higher standards for measuring progress in areas such as anti-drug strategies, corruption, or environmental management.

A significant Canadian contribution to this summit would be to secure a firm commitment from IFIs, international financial institutions, to fund summit mandates, and we hope this will be the number one item on the agenda at next week's meeting of ministers of finance.

In addition, Canada should find one or two niche areas where its engagement in the inter-American agenda can be sustained after the summit. This could be an issue such as building a regional strategy for assisting Colombia in its peace process, or in promoting sound environmental management strategies throughout the region, or striving for further public involvement in the summit process across all summit items, or strengthening the OAS into a true summit secretariat.

We may all remember the APEC fiasco—pepper spray, Suharto, the financial crisis in South Asia—which resulted in a serious letdown factor in Canada, with respect to attention, energy, and resources devoted to the Asia Pacific. We sincerely hope such a post-summit letdown does not follow Quebec, and we hope this committee will continue to focus on the Americas after April 2001.

To this end, FOCAL will continue to work, long after the streets have been cleaned up in Quebec City, on regional priorities in areas such as the need for legal and regulatory reform in the Americas, or promoting the importance of public participation in policy making, also referred to as civil society participation, or developing a realistic trade strategy for Canada and the Americas. As a civil society organization, FOCAL can play its part in promoting a hemispheric agenda by monitoring, following up, and evaluating summit initiatives.

I now turn to Don MacKay for a few specific comments on the topic everybody wants to talk about, the FTAA.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

The members should also know this is perhaps an historic first: we have a father and daughter team. Mr. Pal was here last week, and now his daughter is speaking to us this week. One spoke on transparency, and the other on lack of consultation. There's a sort of connectivity there, if I may use the dreadful term.

Thank you very much.

Mr. MacKay.

Mr. Donald MacKay (Special Adviser, FOCAL): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen. It's a real pleasure to be here to speak in front of the committee.

I'd like to follow up briefly on some of the remarks Michael Hart made a couple of minutes ago, and to put into context the negotiation of a free trade area of the Americas. I'd like to start by backing up slightly and looking at the multilateral system that Michael mentioned is the foundation on which all 34 countries in this process are building this new agreement, this new negotiation. They're doing so on the basis of the World Trade Organization agreements, as embodied under the Uruguay Round.

• 0950

Since 1995, some 90 regional trading arrangements have been notified to the WTO, which added to the approximately 110 previously notified under the GATT system. This brings the total number of regional trading arrangements notified to the multilateral system to over 200. Within this hemisphere, we also have a number of such arrangements. The purpose of those arrangements, of course, is to liberalize trade to levels beyond those that have been possible at the multilateral level.

Looking at this hemisphere and seeing these 34 countries, one might ask what the FTAA's objective would be in liberalizing trade among them. Each country has a possible series of relationships with 33 other countries. In other words, Canada could liberalize its trading relationships with 33 other countries in this hemisphere.

Building the FTAA can be approached from a number of different perspectives. One is a completely new arrangement encompassing all 34. The other approach, and the other reality, is in fact to recognize that there are already arrangements in place liberalizing trade among members of this hemisphere.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, has already achieved this objective among three countries out of the 34 members. The MERCOSUR agreement achieves this objective among four of the members. The Andean community has achieved it for five of the members, etc., etc.

When the negotiation process of the FTAA was launched in December of 1994 in Miami, it did not bring to a screeching halt this process of trade officials and governments talking to each other sub-regionally. For example, Canada is in the final stages of its negotiations with Costa Rica. Should these negotiations succeed—and I don't see any reason why they won't—it will enhance the trade liberalization process taking place in this hemisphere. In the larger scope, this agreement will tick off, if you will, one of the items on the FTAA agenda.

Looking at the totality of goods and services traded within this hemisphere within the context of the agreements already in place, one would be forced to conclude, empirically, that 90% or more of the trade in this hemisphere is already covered. The FTAA, in other words, is already completed to a level of about 90%. It's the final 10% that the FTAA's agenda and the ongoing negotiations among countries seek to fulfil.

The Andean Group, for example, is in negotiations with MERCOSUR at the moment. Should those negotiations be successful, there is absolutely no reason, no need, to repeat them in the FTAA. The FTAA agenda would then be narrowed yet again in order to take into account trade liberalization achieved on a bilateral, plurilateral, or a sub-regional basis.

I wanted to give that context so the members will understand, when considering the FTAA, that a good portion of it has already been achieved and it's an ongoing process.

Michael says the FTAA will not become serious for another five years. Whether I agree with Michael or not is a different question, but seen in the context of the negotiations currently under way or scheduled, such as Canada and CARICOM or Canada and the four Central American republics, elements of that overall trade liberalization program are very much under way and are being achieved on almost a daily basis in this hemisphere.

• 0955

There is no country in this hemisphere that is not a member of one sort of regional trading relationship or another. In a sense, it is a philosophy that has swept this region, and that is a remarkable change from where the political thinking was twenty and thirty years ago.

With that, I thank the members of the committee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. MacKay.

We'll go to Mr. MacInnis, from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Mr. David MacInnis (Vice-President, Public Affairs, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers): Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Before I start, I just want to make one comment, picking up on something Mr. Hart said, and that's his point on the process and why the media perceive it as secret. That's a very pertinent point.

Obviously, secret processes make for good copy. I would therefore suggest that, in large part, we're hearing a lot about secret processes as a result. Based on my experience at the world petroleum congress earlier this summer, I would suggest that when the loudest dissenters of processes such as the summit of the Americas are willing to open the doors of their planning meetings to all who are interested in attending, then let them cast stones.

Mr. Svend Robinson (Burnaby—Douglas, NDP): On April 1 on Parliament Hill, you're more than welcome.

Mr. David MacInnis: I'm talking about planning meetings, Mr. Member. Believe me, in Calgary this past summer it was not possible to get into those meetings. Security was tight—tighter than anything I've seen around trade summits.

It is my hope today that I will leave you with the following message: that market-based policies work; that free trade agreements are good; and that multilateral fora such as the summit of the Americas are a good place to not only advance trade policy, but also those policies aimed at dealing with social and environment issues.

I want to talk a little bit about why this one particular sector I represent, the oil and natural gas industry in Canada, thinks we need the clarity and certainty provided by the processes that the summit of the Americas is discussing.

Market-based policies, especially when contained within a formal trade agreement, serve to increase the clarity and certainty for business. As a result, they allow us to generate jobs and prosperity for Canadians and indeed for global citizens. By their nature, market-based policies also increase competition among those wishing to provide a particular good or service, and by developing the policies that will ensure the economic, social, and environmental stability of a region, the people of that region will benefit greatly. That's why the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is supportive of free trade agreements.

With respect to the summit of the Americas, we believe the multilateral forum is ideal, as I mentioned. We agree, though, with a statement made before this committee a couple of weeks ago by Minister Manley, in which he said economic integration and measures to promote environmental protection and the rights of workers can, and indeed should be, mutually supportive.

With this in mind, we believe that in order for Canadian companies to fulfil their role for increasing the prosperity of Canadians, it's imperative that governments look for ways to enhance existing trade linkages and to develop new ones. By working together, we believe we—the public and private sectors—can create opportunity for all Canadians.

The upstream oil and gas industry—that is, the 160 members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers who explore for, produce, and develop 95% of Canada's oil and natural gas reserves—is responsible for almost half of Canada's trade surplus. Furthermore, over the ten-year period beginning in 1990, the upstream oil and natural gas industry saw its net exports rise from $9 billion to $41 billion.

In addition to our positive effect on the trade surplus, we also have a positive effect on government budgets. In 2000, for example, we made $15 billion in payments to all governments.

Our industry also has a positive impact, we believe, on the Canadian economy as a result of our capital investment programs. In 2000, the industry made $21 billion in capital investments in the Canadian economy. We believe that number will—

The Chair: Sorry to interrupt you, but could you go just a bit slower for the translation process? Your train is going faster and faster.

Mr. David MacInnis: Sorry about that.

• 1000

We estimate that this year our capital investments in the Canadian economy will be about $25 billion. That's how we manage to employ approximately 600,000 Canadians day to day, across the country.

Now that I've made it clear that the upstream oil and natural gas industry is a strong proponent of market-based policies that promote free trade, and that we are a key part of the Canadian economy, I'd like to talk about the need for the Government of Canada to put in place a policy regime that will allow oil and natural gas producers to bring more supply onstream. In addition to helping lower our energy costs, this will also situate us to take advantage of the opportunities that will be present as a result of what we believe will be the eventual development and implementation of the FTAA. When this occurs, the Americas will become a hotbed of business activity, and Canada must ensure it is well placed to supply that burgeoning market with the energy it will demand.

It is slowing somewhat, but demand growth is still outstripping supply growth. This means the only way we can continue to have the desired effect of reducing the price of oil and natural gas is to bring on more supply. Historically, the industry has responded to the pricing signals sent by the market, but as the price goes up, so too does exploration and development activity. In 2000, for example, the industry drilled more wells in one year than in any year previous. The 15,850 wells marked a 30% increase over 1999, and it's expected the record will be broken again this year.

With respect to our reserves, we have significant reserves. At a recent meeting with President Bush, Prime Minister Chrétien mentioned the oil sands. The fact is that we have 300 billion barrels of oil that can currently be produced. We obviously have significant natural gas and conventional oil reserves in eastern and northern Canada. We believe it is important to develop these reserves to meet the anticipated increase in business in the Americas as a result of the FTAA.

In closing, I would like to point out a few things we have to do as a country to ensure that we can take advantage of processes like the FTAA. We need to ensure that we promote more technological research and development in Canada, so as to drive down the cost of doing business, reduce our environmental footprint as an industry, and increase supply. We also need to develop a policy framework that encourages that conditions be favourable to investment, that fiscal regimes be competitive, that energy conservation be promoted, and that departments and agencies having to manage the increased activity by industry have the proper resources to do so.

We also believe that in agreements like the potential FTAA it is important that contract sanctity be preserved, that buyers and sellers be able to access one another freely, and that some degree of coordination on environmental issues is a must if we are to ensure the adoption of high standards of environmental protection and effective enforcement procedures.

Given the belief of the oil and natural gas industry that the summit of the Americas will eventually produce an FTAA, it is no wonder that we view Latin America and the Caribbean as markets with significant potential for our industry. Our desire to be a key player in supplying the energy needs to this burgeoning region is the reason we're so intent on promoting market-based policy actions that will allow Canada, Canadian companies, and indeed Canadians, to realize their full potential.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. MacInnis, sir.

We'll go to questions, beginning with Mr. Lunn.

Mr. Gary Lunn: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It was very refreshing listening to the witnesses this morning. I have lots of questions, but I'm going to just pose one. I'm going to direct it to Mr. Hart and Mr. MacKay, if I may, and then I'll defer the rest of my time to Dr. Martin, Mr. Chairman.

I agree in large part with what you've both said, in that this text is all put there. I don't know how much of it is really serious negotiations that have been under way, although I agree with Mr. MacKay that there are many free trade agreements, both bilateral and multilateral, happening all the time. We will continue to see those, and we are very supportive of them.

• 1005

The one thing I want to let you comment on comes back to my thoughts, as I was involved in negotiations before I was elected, about the need not to put all your cards on the table, with the competing interests of transparency we hear. We hear that all the time, and of course we want more information. We probably would agree with it, although we want more information. Of course, the government can't put their cards on the table. So I'd like your thoughts.

We're also saying that any agreement they reach has to come before Parliament to be passed, because they're democratically elected people. But when you really think about it, they've gone through years of negotiations, they've finally reached agreement, now we're going to bring it before Parliament. Is that a really meaningful way to have input into the agreement? Are you better off to have the parliamentarians discuss all these proposals beforehand and then make their submissions to the government negotiator, so that they can actually see what the committees or the different parties are saying and incorporate that into their negotiations beforehand, as opposed to bringing it to Parliament?

I'd like your viewpoints, and again, I don't want you to misconstrue what I'm saying. I'm very supportive of free trade agreements, but there are competing interests between transparency and openness for the public, many of whom may be very supportive, and the is question when the appropriate time to do that is. So I'd like your thoughts in that whole area.

Mr. Michael Hart: It's a very interesting point. I'm not a great believer that you need to keep this kind of information secret for tactical or strategic reasons in your negotiations, because if you're dealing with another side that is well experienced and you're well experienced, you have a pretty good idea of where they're coming from. If you've done your homework and analysed the kinds of laws and regulations they have in place, the kinds of agreements they have signed, and so on, you have a pretty good idea where that country stands, what the issues are, how much room they have to manoeuvre, and so on. And you know that the area for manoeuvre is fairly narrow.

In fact, one of the biggest challenges we faced in the FTA negotiations was trying to convince the Americans that we were serious. They spent too much time reading the Toronto Star and not enough listening to what we had to say. So there were a number of times when they were convinced that what we were saying wasn't real, whereas it was real. So this wasn't a matter of secrecy or tactics, it was trying to convince the other side that you were prepared to make the kinds of concessions, to enter into the kinds of rules they were working for.

At the same time, however, though it is less a strategic matter, there is an issue of flexibility. Seeing that Mr. Clark is not here, I will give you an example of something he said during the FTA negotiations, and it would have been helpful if he hadn't said it. We were negotiating through that, and he, too early in the game, announced publicly in the House that supply management wasn't on the negotiating table, because it was part of the very warp and woof of Canadian nationhood. I don't know how he made the connection, but never mind; I think parliamentarians are known for exaggeration in the House. I think it would have been helpful if we'd had a little flexibility on that issue a little bit longer before that categorical statement was made by a senior minister of the government at that particular time. But that's about as far as I think that's useful.

A voice: Culture is part of our warp and woof too.

Mr. Michael Hart: No, he said supply management.

The Chair: Mr. MacKay.

Mr. Donald MacKay: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I agree with the direction in which Michael is headed. In respect of the text itself, one could theoretically put before this committee, and its companion committees multiplied throughout the hemisphere, a text that will give you 34 different national treatment articles, simply because in putting forward their negotiating position, all 34 countries sat down, drafted a national treatment provision, and submitted that as part of their bargaining, part of the negotiating process. The 34 different draftings of the national treatment provision will not differ greatly from article 3 of the original GATT of 1947—and Michael has the text in front of him. The national treatment provision in the GATT differs very little from that in the NAFTA, differs very little in other agreements.

• 1010

But 34 countries have, in good faith, done their homework and put forward their wants and their desires in respect of the negotiations. That could, in that sense, be made available. It would, I think, as Michael says, confuse matters more than clarify matters. You can replicate that same approach through negotiations in areas of intellectual property, in terms of government procurement, all the issues that stand before the nine negotiating groups of the FTAA. That's not a difficult process to effect, but it's probably not a helpful process.

As to the statement with respect to parliamentary approval, that of course is a sine qua non. All 34 participants in this process must follow their respective constitutional requirements on the approval of international agreements or international treaties, depending on how individual constitutions judge these things. In most of Latin America, these agreements are considered treaties, they are considered to be self-executing treaties, and self-executing treaties, in all cases that I'm aware of, require approval by the legislative branch of government. In some cases that's a lower house and an upper house, in some cases it may be limited to only an upper house. It will depend on different things.

One of the assignments I had in the post-NAFTA period in the Department of Foreign Affairs was to shepherd, if you will, what was then Bill C-115, the implementing legislation for the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the time that was the single largest piece of legislation ever submitted to the House of Commons and the Canadian Senate. And in considering that legislation, both houses held hearings. We went through the course of first reading, second reading, etc. The opportunity for input was provided according to how the Canadian Constitution is set out. Certain responsibilities are given to the executive arm, certain responsibilities are given to the legislative. Far be it from me to comment on that division and that balance of power, but that exists throughout the hemisphere, and you and your colleagues in other countries will have that opportunity.

I might make one additional point, and that is simply to state that any request for information or for briefings parliamentarians make to ministers, in my experience in the government, were always dealt with extremely seriously, extremely rapidly. And if there's an area that is bothering a member, nothing works as quickly as a simple request from a member of Parliament. It will be listened to and you will get a response.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We're supposed to be in five-minute sessions, but we're now up to nine minutes. But we'll get back to Dr. Martin, because we'll have lots of time to go back and forth.

[Translation]

Ms. Lalonde, you have the floor.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: I am addressing Mr. Hart and Mr. Brunelle.

Mr. Hart, you had me going up the wall with your serene manner of expressing the arrogance of an expert.

As a parliamentarian I, also, have negotiated for a long time, I have heard all the things you've said. When negotiations reach a level of importance like that of the FTAA, as was also the case of NAFTA and FTA, political, economic and socio-cultural issues are at stake and they affect the population.

It is essential that the population and parliamentarians who were elected to raise the standard of education, have the information they need in order to know what is at stake. I will accept that there are 900 pages with all kinds of parentheses and the whole thing could be boiled down to three pages. If it can be boiled down to three pages and if it still contains the issues, then it is perfect because it is the issues that count. They do count, just as they did when Chapter 11 was drafted by experts who seemingly had not the least idea of how it could be used by corporations.

• 1015

Thus, I will continue to insist very strongly that the basic texts of the negotiations be published so that we can discuss the issues. That is what counts. Without the texts, we cannot know what the issues are. By issues we mean, of course, that on the one hand one country wants one thing while on the other hand, another country wants another thing. But at least we will know what we will be debating. I think that, politically, we absolutely must know that.

Let me come back to Chapter 11 and say that there should be no such chapter on investments, although we have one now. Finally, once the experts prepared it, without thinking that they would be leaving such an open door to corporations, we ended up with this text. I think that some of these experts would not be ready now to write the texts again in that way. We must know where we stand on that matter, especially now since the Europeans have defeated the MIA which was more or less a corollary of Chapter 11.

My question is a long one, but I wanted to describe the issues as I see them.

As for Mr. Brunelle, I would like him to tell me about the need for transparency so that people can be mobilized, because it is needed. Pierre Marc Johnson reminded us of this as regards the environment, precisely so that we could debate this issue and apply the right pressure. Governments also need this balance of power to counterbalance the power of corporations. We must not deny the fact that negotiations go on not only among countries, but also within each country.

Let me finish by saying that none other than Vincente Fox stated that if NAFTA was good “economically”, it did not help to redistribute wealth in Mexico at all, quite the contrary.

The Chair: You have taken up four minutes of the five minutes allotted for your question period.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Please be generous, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: No, no. I simply mean that the answers should not be too lengthy.

[English]

Mr. Michael Hart: Madame, I do not disagree with you that in order for a parliamentarian to make a useful contribution to the public debate, they have to have access to materials as to what's really going on in the negotiations. What I was trying to suggest is that the text that would be released, if they were to release all 900 pages of it, would not be useful to you, because it is a very confused text with all kinds of material in it, and it would set all kinds of red herrings going.

More useful, I think, is the material currently available on the site prepared by the OAS, which has a lot of very useful background information on where the various issues are, what are the current issues. It would be very useful to look at some of the national websites, some of which are better than others, indicating where these countries are coming from. But the text, I think, would be most unhelpful in that case.

As to the second thing, chapter 11 has a very long history. It was not something that just emerged out of the blue during the NAFTA negotiations. It goes back to agreements negotiated in the 1960s having to do with foreign investment protection agreements, or as they're called in the U.S., bilateral investment treaties, which included these kinds of provisions. Many of these hark back to provisions of the World Bank, of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, and most are based on the law of New York—interestingly, many of these kinds of investment treaties require that they be resolved on the basis of the law of New York. But these were largely agreements between industrialized and developing countries.

What was new in the NAFTA was the attempt to introduce that concept within a free trade agreement between two industrialized and one developing country. I think they found that was more of a challenge than they had thought, because it required some tuning of that to the law, looking at the applicability of some of these provisions to the two countries.

• 1020

As to that, I think there's one area that requires further thinking. I think the minister identified that in an interesting op-ed piece in the papers last week, indicating that the text on the concept of expropriation and action tantamount to expropriation probably needs some further thinking. That further thinking is the result of a number of these actions that have come forward. I think most legal experts are somewhat surprised at decisions made by the arbitral panels. I think the view for a while was that these arbitral panels would resolve the issue by making sensible decisions. That apparently is not the case. Therefore, I think it is an area where there is room for further negotiation.

That's not an unknown concept, that after you've had some experience with the text, whether it be a national law or an international agreement, you renegotiate it and say, we've found a better way to deal with that. I see that in domestic law and I see it in international law. I think that's a fairly natural development, which is likely to happen over the next four or five years.

[Translation]

The Chair: Professor Brunelle.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Regarding transparency, I think that there is an important point that must be emphasized. The text only calls for transparency in a secondary way, because the text...

I heard some rather surprising things this morning. Ms. Stephenson, from the OAS, reported on the state of negotiations in March. We had a fair notion of what was to be included in the FTAA agreement. I think that that has been said. But I doubt that the text takes up thousands of pages.

As for the substance of what this free trade agreement contains, in NAFTA, it is essentially contained in Chapter 11 and Chapter 10, namely the chapter on investments and the chapter on contracting out.

Let me draw your attention, Mr. Chairman, to a basic problem. Speaking of the role of parliamentarians after negotiations, should we believe that democracy consists in parliamentarians receiving a text negotiated by experts in utter secrecy, in perfect connivance with the business world, which means, of course, that the criteria of objectivity are seldom respected?

In acting in this way, what is forgotten or what is left unsaid, is that NAFTA, more specifically, as it becomes institutionalized, divests parliaments of their power. Now, let me state that clearly.

Do you know what is happening with the NAFTA Commission? Do you know what the power of the NAFTA Commission is? Do you know what useful purpose is served by the work of the NAFTA Commission? Now, there is an important article in the NAFTA agreement, article 1024, that states that the exceptions that the article contains regarding contracting out more specifically, only apply until December 31, 1998. This commission was launched at that time.

Mr. Hart just spoke about his students, who are all experts in access to information. I would like any one of Mr. Hart's students or Mr. Hart himself to give you, the parliamentarians, all the relevant information regarding this commission's work. Is this commission an umbrella for the work of 30 committees and negotiation groups who do nothing, or does it do some kind of useful work?

This is where the problem of parliamentary approval becomes very contentious. It is one thing for parliamentarians to accept the text, but it is another thing when parliamentarians, by approving the text, or at least the NAFTA strategy, also approve the negative side of NAFTA whereby they go on divesting themselves of their own prerogatives. Mr. Chairman, you do not know what is happening with the NAFTA negotiations. This is where the difficulty lies. The issue is not in finding out whether the FTAA will make it easier to bring Tarapac« wine from Chile to Canada. The issue is in knowing whether the negative side will be approved once again.

The other contentious problem emphasized by my honourable colleague Hart, is obviously the issue of Chapter 11, under which Canada is currently being sued in 13 instances for a sum of 10 billion dollars. That is the contentious point.

Let us not hide the rest of it. Let us not use all kinds of trivial problems as red herrings, Mr. Chairman. This is what it really involves. And Minister Pettigrew personally stated that Chapter 11 was becoming quite a burden.

Is that what we want to spread across all the Americas? We must answer either yes or no to that question. And if you were informed about this, civil society would feel much less anxious at this time, especially about the other aspect that was not mentioned.

In my opinion, this is where we can see the powerful originality of these agreements. This is where the originality of the NAFTA Commission lies, in its set of mandates that go beyond any kind of accountability in the Americas.

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The Chair: Thank you, Professor. Mr. Paradis.

Mr. Denis Paradis (Brome—Missisquoi, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I congratulate all the participants.

We are certainly dealing with a Summit of heads of State and we can see the interest aroused by this summit. One intervener spoke of civil society and of building a bridge with parliamentarians. I think that the hearings we are holding today are an excellent way to build this bridge between civil society, NGOs and elected parliamentarians. We wonder what role NGOs play in all this. We are also elected parliamentarians. Each one of us represents a population of about 100,000 persons, and it is important to have a contact with NGOs but also with the people in our ridings.

Mr. Brunelle had a message for us earlier on: rich countries and poor countries should be brought closer together. I think that it is important that we succeed in bringing rich countries closer to poor countries during the summit at all levels, trade, human rights, environment and democracy.

But I certainly differ with Mr. Brunelle regarding FIPA and COPA. I take this opportunity to congratulate our chairman Bill Graham as well as Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette who put their shoulder to the wheel in creating the FIPA, the Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas. Rightly or wrongly, as was already mentioned in this room, Mr. Charbonneau used the COPA in Quebec for political purposes, as regards separation. I think that the FIPA has an important role to play for parliamentarians in America.

Regarding the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, you said earlier that it was a disgrace that sufficient funds were not granted for the Peoples' Summit. Well, I think that the contribution of $300,000 by the Canadian government and $200,000 by the Quebec government are something that Canada and Quebec can be proud of.

Let me end with a question for Ms. Robinson. Currently, Canada is close to the American market, but it also has a dual culture, both Latin and Anglo-Saxon. South American countries share the Latin culture with us. They also share a legal system. We have a dual legal system in this country: civil law and common law. All South American countries have a civil law system similar to the civil law system we have in Quebec.

Eight hundred million people live in the Americas. There are about 300 million Americans, but that still leaves 500 million. What can Canada do to promote the values you mentioned: values of democracy, the environment, that are on the agenda? What more do you think we can do to promote these values more vigorously, given what I just said?

[English]

Ms. Nobina Robinson: Thank you very much for that question. It's a really important one. It's something we struggle with every day at FOCAL.

Earlier today, I think it was Professor Brunelle who said we shouldn't let commerce be the only driving force of our relationship with the Americas, and I quite agree. Our foreign policy has its three pillars of economic interests, values, and security issues. When you try to apply that to the Americas, some cynics could say there's not a lot in it. When you look at the trade stats, 87% of our trade is with the U.S. We're fighting for 13% of the pie, which we share with Europe and Asia. How far can we go with Latin America?

I think there are more things we still can do on the values side of the agenda. It's really the social and the development parts of the puzzle that we're not getting into yet in concrete, specific ways. Part of it is to think about how small CIDA's budget is for development aid to the region. On the bilateral side it is, I think—maybe Madame Marleau would know better than I—$190 million a year, and then a little bit more through the multilateral system.

• 1030

Let's look at some areas where this region has commonalities, which I think is what you were driving at. Beyond the fact that we have similar legal systems, our inherited western tradition, and a democracy that's now emerging in the region, there are problems we all have that are transnational. Let's look at public insecurity. Let's look at rising rates of violence, urban insecurity, and urban crime.

The environmental management issue...and I don't mean the unfortunate way CBC radio talked about it this morning. The environment ministers are going to talk about climate change. I'm referring here to things like clean air and clean cities.

There are things Canada can do to engage this region in addressing the problem. The inequities that abound often stem from the redistributive powers of governments. I think this committee has discussed the smaller economies, which will have to reduce their tariff barriers if they finally sign on to an FTA. They're going to have to look at increasing revenue sources from some other form of taxation. Now, Canada can show them a model of how we govern here. We have a lot in common with the anglophone Caribbean, and I fear that the anglophone Caribbean has been dropping off the map.

These are just some quick thoughts that come to mind, but I agree that it's not just simply about hosting meetings. It's also not about foisting our domestic problems off onto the hemisphere but a lot more about listening to their needs. The needs in the end come down to resolving problems of public insecurity and income inequality.

[Translation]

Mr. Denis Paradis: Thank you.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Robinson.

Mr. Robinson.

Mr. Svend Robinson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I've got questions in a couple of areas, but I wanted to just follow up on the comment that Ms. Lalonde made with respect to Mr. Hart's evidence. I must say that I had much the same feeling as I was listening to it. I felt that it was an incredibly, frankly arrogant and patronizing suggestion that somehow these documents are really long and complex—my God, 900 pages—so we should basically leave it to the experts. Then, to follow up, we were told we could always check out these great websites, the OAS website and the Government of Canada's website.

If Mr. Hart has looked at the Government of Canada's website, perhaps he's aware of the fact that on some fundamental issues, i.e., investment, services, intellectual property, and dispute settlement, the government doesn't have a thing to say—absolutely nothing. So to say to just look at the website.... I don't know if he's looked at the website, but there's nothing there. There's absolutely nothing there.

So this process is profoundly undemocratic. I don't know if this whole obscene corporate sponsorship of the summit.... Professor Brunelle has talked about the business forum. We've got this spectacle of corporations that can buy their way to preferred seating next to their favourite leader. If they give a lot of money, well, my God, they can actually make a little speech at the opening reception.

This is a perversion of democracy, Mr. Chairman. I think there are some really serious concerns about that. Then I hear Mr. Hart saying that we shouldn't bother our little heads about this stuff, it'll come to us eventually, and it's really complicated. Frankly, I'm really offended by that, and when I hear the minister say that all the trade deals look the same anyway.... That's the concern some of us have, Mr. Chairman.

If they're going to move a chapter 11 or some version of a chapter 11 into the FTAA, some of us have some very serious concerns about that and about what that will mean for Canadians. Professor Brunelle has spoken eloquently on that.

I believe it was Mr. MacKay who said that it's WTO-plus we're talking about here. Some of us are concerned about the WTO as it stands now. When we look at what the WTO is doing to Brazil in Brazil's efforts to make sure that affordable drugs can be provided to people living with HIV and AIDS, it's frankly appalling. When we look at what the WTO is doing to Canada concerning the Patent Act, we see it's not good. So I don't want WTO-plus.

This leads me to my question, and it would be directed to Mr. Brunelle and to anyone else who wants to respond, perhaps Mr. Hart. I have two questions. One, some people—some parties around this table—have suggested that what we should be doing at the FTAA is inserting some clauses to try to make it better. We should, for example, insert a clause that makes reference to workers' rights into the heart of the agreement. We should include a social clause in the heart of the agreement to strengthen it. Perhaps human rights should have primacy over trade law.

• 1035

I'd be interested to hear the witnesses' suggestions on that and on how those clauses would be enforced. Or perhaps they think that instead of trying to amend agreements, an exercise that many of us see as trying to add provisions onto agreements that are already undemocratic, we should be trying to renegotiate existing agreements.

And my second question is, what about Cuba? There's one country in the hemisphere that has been told that they are not part of the la grande familia. This represents, I think, a pretty sad reversal of the Prime Minister's earlier position, when he said that in fact Canada would be prepared to welcome Cuba into la grande familia. Nothing has changed in terms of democracy since he said that.

There have been some concerns about human rights in the area of freedom of expression, but I would point out that if human rights is a concern, you should have a look at Colombia. See what's happening in that country if you want to talk about human rights. If you want to talk about human rights in Guatemala, human rights in America with respect to economic, social and cultural rights particularly.... What do the witnesses have to say about the exclusion of Cuba from la grande familia?

The Chair: Who is going to go first?

[Translation]

Professor Brunelle.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Let me start with the issue of the social and environmental articles.

NAFTA is a precedent and an example where we had two side agreements: a side agreement for co-operation in labour and a side agreement for co-operation on the environment. Experts say that these agreements have very little clout, but they were useful nonetheless.

The government made a commitment to try to have similar agreements in the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, the FTAA. This would be useful. On the other hand, the newly elected President of the United States, who was, by the way, elected with a minority—this shows how democratic that country is—is entirely against this strategy. Thus, I feel that the future for social provisions is not very bright.

At the fundamental level, however, I'm rather uncomfortable answering the question since I am here to represent the Réseau québécois sur l'intégration continentale, which has several member organizations, such as the CSN, the CSQ, the FTQ, nurses and public servants who are involved, even at the ICFTU level in the process of defending the social rights clauses, sometimes referred to as human rights. The reason why I am uncomfortable is because of the point I made previously, that is the approach taken in NAFTA in particular. If the same approach were taken by the FTAA, a social clause could no longer be upheld because everything would be on the table.

It's rather interesting. Perhaps the question should be put to a minister, for example, Minister Pettigrew. When he assures us that health is not up for negotiation, is this consistent with the mandate that was given to the NAFTA Commission or he is not aware of what the NAFTA Commission is doing? My assumption is that he is probably unaware of what the NAFTA Commission is doing.

As for the matter of Cuba, that is a contentious issue. The problem of the exclusion of Cuba from the Americas goes back to the beginning of the 1960s. It's a leftover from the Cold War. Perhaps Canada should try to maintain some consistency on this and attempt to bring Cuba into the process. It would be very interesting because it would bring about a significant change in the dynamic. The smallest economies would not be caught in a situation as difficult as the present one is for them. I think it would be a good idea, but the problem is to what extent can Canada maintain a position consistent with its historic recognition of Cuba, regardless of the difficulties for the Americans who are maintaining their exclusion of Cuba, and these are difficulties that cannot be minimized.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to impose on you to come back to...

The Chair: You can answer another question.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Is that allowed? I was rather shocked by Mr. Paradis' remark.

The Chair: The questions are mine.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Well ask me that one and I'll answer Mr. Paradis.

I think his remark was quite amazing. I adjusted the calculation, Mr. Chairman, and here's the result. It works out to $12 per person for the participants in the People's Summit. For the heads of State, it's $2 million. So that's the breakdown and the burst of laughter is eloquent enough.

The Chair: We won't start debating the figures.

[English]

Perhaps, Mr. Hart, we can go to you to answer Mr. Robinson's questions, and then....

• 1040

Mr. Svend Robinson: Ms. Robinson may want to comment briefly on Cuba, I think.

The Chair: Yes, you could perhaps comment on Cuba, and then we'll move on, because we're now well over the time, as usual.

Mr. Michael Hart: There's lots of food for thought in Mr. Robinson's question. Let me comment on a few of the issues he raised.

One issue is the arrogance of experts. I find it curious to be asked to come here as an expert witness and then be told that my expertise is not wanted.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Michael Hart: This is an interesting, curious development.

When I suggested that it would not be of much use to you to look at the text, I was giving you an expert opinion that the text would not provide you with any information that is useful in the kind of political and so on analysis that you want to engage in and that the websites are likely to yield more useful information. Now, you suggested that because the website of the Government of Canada does not contain texts on issues like investment, dispute settlement, and so on—

Mr. Svend Robinson: It doesn't contain our negotiating position.

Mr. Michael Hart: Well, I interpret it differently than you do. I interpret, for instance, the absence of a text on dispute—

Mr. Pat O'Brien (London—Fanshawe, Lib.): Can't we hear from the witness, Mr. Chairman, without interruption? A level of courtesy would be appreciated.

The Chair: Don't worry about Professor Hart. He's pretty good at looking after himself. He's a world-recognized expert, so don't worry.

Mr. Michael Hart: I interpret the absence of a text on dispute settlement to mean that the Government of Canada is satisfied that the text that is in the WTO is where they want to be. They are not really interested in adding a new, more complicated dimension to that because they are satisfied with it. I may be incorrect, but that's my interpretation of the absence of that text.

Mr. Svend Robinson: What about the absence of a position on investment?

Mr. Michael Hart: Their position would be similar on investment because the Government of Canada has repeatedly stated publicly that they are concerned about aspects of the current chapter 11 of NAFTA, particularly the investor-state provision and the definition of what that is. The Government of Canada is unprepared to put forward a text because they are not ready to negotiate that issue, but I think they have publicly stated where they're coming from. If there is an investment text in that agreement, it will be less than the NAFTA text because they don't like that particular provision. Again, that's not a difficult thing to interpret.

On the issue of whether this is a democratic process, let me say this. Here we have parliamentarians who are holding hearings, who will have the full text before them, and who are part of a Parliament where there is an elected government negotiating these agreements. I find it curious that some are saying that the negotiations are not a democratic process because a number of unelected groups have taken a position that is different from that of the Government of Canada. I don't find that undemocratic. I find that differences of view are part of the democratic process going on in this country.

I have a different view from that of the Government of Canada on some of these issues too. I agree with you that inviting corporate sponsorship of this summit is obscene and a very bad piece of judgment on the part of the government. That doesn't the whole process that's going on is thereby put into question.

I agree very much with what Ms. Robinson said, that this meeting in Quebec City is really not about the FTAA. It's about a broader process of confidence building, networking, and so on of the hemisphere as a whole using the process started in 1994 and making much better use of the inter-American organizations. These include the OAS, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

If anyone had suggested to people in the Department of External Affairs in 1990 that the OAS would do a useful job in the late 1990s, they would have laughed, because the OAS at that time was considered a joke. It's no longer considered a joke because it is doing very useful work. The current secretary general, Mr. Gaviria, has done an excellent job in providing us with a basis.

Now, why is Cuba not there? That's not a Canadian decision. That is a decision made by the OAS, by the membership as a whole. I think they are very proud of the fact that since 1994 they have put a process in place that recognizes the importance of democratically elected governments cooperating with one another. I think that the opinion of all members of the OAS is that Cuba does not currently have a democratically elected government. Now, one can have a difference of view on that, but I agree that the current Cuban government is not democratically elected, and I believe this is why the OAS members have excluded Cuba from this process.

Thank you.

The Chair: We'll comment on the Cuban situation in a moment, because we're now seriously over the proposed time.

Ms. Nobina Robinson: I do want to say on the issue of the side accords—the side issues of labour and environment—why wait for 2005 or 2008 to enshrine them in the trade agreement? Let's drive them into the summit now. Let's look at it that way. Let's put a democracy clause or a democracy language—whatever you want to say—in the summit now that will make the FTAA have to respect it. Why wait and drag this all into the negotiations that will inevitably take another four years, five years—Mr. Hart, who is much more expert than I, can say—maybe eight years to implement?

• 1045

On Cuba, I have spoken to you, Mr. Robinson, about this before. I disagree that it's a reversal in Canadian position. And I also disagree that Cuba is being excluded in the summit process because of human rights. We really have to put the focus on political systems. For those who don't know me, I spent three years of my career as a diplomat representing Canada in Havana and getting to the underbelly of the system there. The lack of a market economy, the lack of political parties, that is, representative democracy, the lack of respect that Cuba displays for the multilateral system—it is one of the most obstructive governments in the UN—mean that Cuba is not really ready to be a summit player.

This is not a Canadian view. This would be shared by Argentina. I can name countries; government officials cannot. This would be shared by Argentina or Costa Rica and other countries of the hemisphere. We might even find Mexico coming online here. There are summit action items—whether they have to do with anti-corruption, civil and military relations, environmental management, management of financial systems, the whole labour issue—that are simply today not in Cuba's vocabulary. I would very much like them to be.

The closing point I'd make on Cuba is that Cuba itself does not wish to be at the summit. You have to look back at statements made at the time of the Santiago summit in 1998. Cuba did not want to be at the summit. Why? Because the U.S. is there. So let's take the focus off a shifting Canadian foreign policy. Let us look at this as a hemispheric challenge.

The Chair: Thank you very much. That's very helpful.

Now, Mr. Casey. Sorry to keep you waiting so long.

Mr. Bill Casey (Cumberland—Colchester, PC): Thank you very much.

As we go into this, we have 34 countries involved, all with different forms of government, all with different constitutions. What happens if we do come to an agreement and the agreement rules conflict with the country's constitution? Which has priority? Mr. Hart, what rule has priority, the agreement or the constitution of the country? And how do you resolve that?

Mr. Michael Hart: It depends very much what's in the agreement and what's in the constitution of the country. There are different ways to resolve that.

When the GATT was negotiated in 1947, it was implemented on the basis of what's known as the protocol of provisional application. And what that meant is that governments agreed in that agreement that they would implement it insofar as was not inconsistent with existing law, and agreed that in future, when they changed their law, they would bring it further into consistency with the GATT. So in that sense, the constitutions prevailed.

In the case of the WTO, there is a clause in there, Article XVI.4, which states very clearly that the member governments of that agreement, when they sign it, have an obligation to implement the full text—the full agreement—into their domestic law. Now, if there is a conflict between two governments as to whether or not one government has implemented that agreement fully, the government that is found to be at fault, that has not implemented its obligations fully, then faces an interesting choice. Either it can change its laws and bring its laws into conformity with an agreement, or it can say sorry, but this goes further than this government is prepared to go. It's either going to withdraw from this agreement or it's going to accept the kind of opprobrium that exists if you fail to implement an agreement that you have entered into and signed.

Mr. Robinson alluded to poor Brazil because the Brazilians are in just such a situation, since a WTO panel has now, on five occasions, found that Brazil's export subsidy program is in contravention of its WTO obligations. Brazil has now indicated that if they bring their laws into line with their WTO obligations they won't be able to sell any airplanes, and therefore they plan not to bring them into conformity, which puts Canada in the very difficult position of deciding what it can do in order to put pressure on Brazil to do what it promised it would do.

• 1050

Looking at it not as a government official, but as someone who has a very high regard for the rule of law, I think this is a very sad development that a major developing country has taken the position that it solemnly enters into an agreement, signs it, implements it into law, and then says that it's now inconvenient, so it won't implement it. That has very serious implications.

The Chair: That sounds like the United States, doesn't it, Mr. Hart?

Mr. Michael Hart: No, that's not right, Mr. Chairman. I think that's unfair to the United States. It's too easy to conclude that what a U.S. senator or a U.S. member of Congress says is what the United States does and says. The United States is a country where there is a tremendous amount of flux in what people say, but the United States has a very good record of implementing and living up to its international agreements.

Mr. Bill Casey: I would like you to go back to that example, not because of the example, but because it might give us an idea of what would happen in the future.

Brazil has acknowledged that they're not in compliance and they're not going to be in compliance. Have they acknowledged that they're not in compliance?

Mr. Michael Hart: They have indicated how difficult it would be to come into compliance.

Mr. Bill Casey: They say that they're not going to. So the other countries—the other signatories to the WTO—what action can they take now?

Mr. Michael Hart: I think this is the issue that's facing the Government of Canada—how to exercise pressure on Brazil to come into conformity.

One of the agreed ways in the WTO, under the dispute settlement understanding, is that you can retaliate—that is, you can withdraw concessions that Canada has granted to Brazil on a unilateral basis. Experience demonstrates that when you do that, you're more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than hurt Brazil. It would be very hard to explain to Canadian orange juice drinkers why they have to pay more for their orange juice in order to help Bombardier sell more airplanes.

So that concept of retaliation, while it is important, is one that has its limits. I think this is one of the issues we're currently facing. It's similarly being faced in two other celebrated cases where the European Union is not implementing agreements—one on beef hormones and the other on bananas—and where they've accepted retaliation, but they also accept that retaliation is really not the solution. So that probably is an issue that needs to be addressed and negotiated in the future.

Mr. Bill Casey: When we get into this with 34 countries, if a smaller country is not in conformity, how do the larger countries try to pressure them to comply without the impression of the elephant trying to roll over the other?

Mr. Michael Hart: Part of it is an issue of determining whether it is a wilful lack of compliance or whether there's a capacity issue. I think in many of the countries in the Americas it would not be difficult to demonstrate that a number of the smaller countries are not in full compliance with their WTO obligations, not because they are wilfully trying to ignore them, but because those WTO obligations can be quite onerous. They require large resources. So the Government of Canada and the OAS have, for quite a number of years now, engaged in a capacity-building exercise to help these governments gain the capacity—gain the human resources—to be able to implement their existing WTO obligations.

The case of Brazil is a little different. That's not an issue of capacity. That's a clear indication by Brazil that it finds this particular rule difficult to implement. It has indicated that it finds it unfair. That's a negotiating issue, not a legal issue. The first thing you do is you implement, and then you say that you don't like this rule, you want to renegotiate it—just as Canada has indicated that it's not happy with the chapter 11 definition and wants to renegotiate. That's a perfectly normal position.

But I think it is difficult to take a country seriously when it says that it's not going to live up to rules that it has solemnly agreed to.

Mr. Bill Casey: This is a question for Ms. Robinson. In your information it appears that you would prefer to just have bilateral agreements rather than a large agreement. Do I read that correctly? Is FOCAL against the free trade of the Americas agreement, as it is, or would you prefer just agreements between two countries at a time? That's the impression I got from the information.

Ms. Nobina Robinson: I will defer to Don MacKay for the answer, but I will say that it all depends on the time period of when you're looking at these trade agreements. If you're looking at a life without fast-track authority in the U.S., or what is now referred to as trade promotion authority, which is the effective obstacle to hemispheric agreement, then we are very much for Canada getting ahead and doing a Canada-Costa Rica or Canada-CARICOM and doing all the hub-and-spoking. But if the Americans are ready to now really deal with market access and anti-dumping, then we would much rather prefer to see it come into the hemisphere as an entire agreement.

I don't know, Don, whether you would like to add to that.

Mr. Donald MacKay: If I left that impression, Mr. Casey, I apologize. That certainly was not my intention.

• 1055

I was simply pointing out that the objective is trade liberalization, if you think of it in terms of tariffs, which is the easiest concept to deal with in that sense.

If you have a tariff at 15%, full trade liberalization is 0%, a third of the way is 10%, and two-thirds of the way would be a 5% tariff. If the multilateral system, which is about tariff reduction at this stage with eventual elimination, takes your 15% down to 10%, you have achieved a public good. You have moved toward tariff or trade liberalization.

If it requires a regional approach to go from 10% to 0%, it's wonderful. If a regional approach is not possible but a bilateral approach might be because of the circumstances involved between the two countries, then I see no reason why the bilateral approach should not be pursued in the absence of an ability to do it at a larger level.

I think there is one area where almost every trade negotiator or trade official I've ever known would agree. If we could achieve full trade liberalization on a multilateral basis, the raison d'être for all of these regional trading arrangements would disappear overnight.

Michael was involved in the Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations. I was involved in the North American free trade negotiations. I think we personally have a certain amount of pride in authorship of our respective agreements. I can tell you, for myself, I have absolutely no hesitancy whatsoever to give up the NAFTA, if what was achieved in the NAFTA would be achievable at the global level under the WTO. It's what we're all striving towards.

At some point we will actually reach that point. Whether it's in my lifetime or not is a different question. I simply would take a bilateral or a plurilateral approach among three or four countries only in the absence of an ability to do it at a larger stage.

Mr. Bill Casey: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. O'Brien.

Mr. Pat O'Brien: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

There are a couple of very interesting testimonies, certainly from some different perspectives, to say the least. I welcome it all. I don't agree with everything I've heard, but I welcome it all. We have invited you here, so you're all welcome to share your views.

On the idea that somehow we're in danger of just having a commercial relationship with the United States, a couple of witnesses have made that point. I think the phrase was “our only driving force”. I find that rather incredible when a non-trade issue dominating discussions right now is our possible participation in the NASA missile defence with the United States. We certainly are involved in a bilateral trade relationship with the United States. I think there's a whole plethora of ways we are very closely related to the United States, excluding commerce. It's more an observation, Mr. Chairman. I found that a curious comment.

Another curious one I heard was that we had somehow wasted time by having this fight with Quebec. It seems to me that the Premier of Quebec wants to be able to speak on the same basis as the Prime Minister and the other national leaders who are coming. There's no precedent I'm aware of. I would like the witnesses to correct me. Is there any other time when one of these conferences had been held in a province where the premier of that province was invited to address the gathering on the same basis as the leaders of the countries participating? I know of none, but I'd like to hear if there was one.

Mr. Chairman, on the issue of chapter 11 and the concerns the government has and many people in Canada have, including parliamentarians, to be clear once again, the minister has said repeatedly inside and outside the House that he has serious concerns about chapter 11 and the scope that has been given to it. He would have very grave reservations about signing an FTAA that would include any NAFTA-like chapter 11. I think there may have been a different insinuation. I want to repeat that again for the record, because he said it repeatedly.

• 1100

Really, Mr. Chairman, it leads me to my only question, with this comment first. I know the minister has several times enumerated the ways in which the government has tried to be as transparent as possible on the negotiating text, which several witnesses have spoken to. Indeed, the Prime Minister has said in the House that he would be prepared to release those texts, but he cannot and will not do so unilaterally because it would simply go against the agreement of the participating parties.

That point was also made at the very useful FIPA conference, Mr. Chairman, which you co-chaired so ably. I felt it was pretty unfair to characterize that as not a useful process. I think that would be one way to put it.

My question on transparency is this. Accepting that we would like to do as much as possible and more on transparency, and because there's great expertise here, can any witness tell me of a trade negotiation in which Canada has participated in the past that was more transparent than this one? If so, exactly how was it more transparent?

[Translation]

The Chair: Professor Brunelle.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: The first thought that came to my mind as I was listening to Mr. O'Brien concerned Canada-U.S. relations and non-trade issues. If you have the time, I would suggest you take a look at something very interesting on the Web site of the American Department of Defence relating to this anti-missile shield, since we've heard a great deal about Web sites this morning. Go and see why the Americans want to set up a shield like this in the post- Cold War context. One of the arguments mentioned on the Web site of the Defence Department is the protection of American investments abroad. That strikes me as rather an aggressive way of protecting them but I mentioned this merely in response to Mr. O'Brien.

As for the question concerning the precedent relating to Quebec, Mr. Chairman, I don't know whether people have forgotten what the word courtesy means. The mayor of Quebec could be invited, along with the premier of the Province of Quebec. If it were taking place in another province, then of course this courtesy would be displayed. In this instance, courtesy has been set aside for reasons of political partisanship but it should be remembered that courtesy prevails in certain circumstances and even in certain countries. One might wish to have a look at the precedents, but there aren't any. This is the first event of this type in Canada. So it might be a good idea to show some innovation along with courtesy. Of course, in the present circumstances, political partisanship carries the day.

As for transparency, the first comment I would like to make is that the system of negotiations for the Americas is the least transparent of all. At the famous meeting in Seattle, according to our calculations, there were 732 non-governmental organizations with access to the entire process in that city. There is nothing comparable in the case of the Americas. As a matter of fact, in a well-known text, Ms. Stephenson admits herself that one of the reasons for the success of the negotiation is the fact that it has been conducted in such a low-key fashion, that is in secret. Insofar as secrecy is an advantage for negotiations, we once again find ourselves caught up in this infernal logic.

One of the agreements that did circulate was the late lamented MAI, the multilateral agreement on investments. At the time it was negotiated, it was easily available on the OECD Web site. You would now have a very hard time finding any trace at all of this MAI on the OECD Web site at the present time because after the failure of the negotiations, everything was removed. Two organizations were consulted for the MAI negotiations, BIAC and TUAC. You have already heard both these acronyms, I don't need to explain them. So there was a certain degree of transparency. As a matter of fact, Mr. Svend Robinson asked for a debate to be held on the issue. So things did happen with respect to MAI. Then there is the example that I often give of the agreement on the International Criminal Tribunal which circulated without any difficulty.

I think we should devote more thought to this issue of transparency. Of course, I am not suggesting that we ask for all 900 pages of the text, I think that they can be left with the negotiators, but there are fundamental questions that we must be able to raise for the sake of transparency. Otherwise, it is a mockery to talk about democracy. A democracy with no transparency doesn't mean much. So there are a number of questions, for example the issue of Chapter 11 on investments. There is also the issue about the positive or negative approach. I think that these are the agreement's most controversial questions.

• 1105

[English]

Mr. Pat O'Brien: Mr. Chairman, I didn't hear an answer from Professor Brunelle on that question, but I'd like to ask the other witnesses to at least address themselves to the questions I did pose.

Mr. Hart, I'd like to hear from you.

Mr. Michael Hart: On the issue of transparency, what we've seen over the last fifty years are increasingly transparent negotiations.

Am I allowed to make a small ad, Mr. Chairman? I have a book coming—

The Chair: As long as it's not an expertise ad. No expertise, please.

Mr. Michael Hart: No, but I recommend it highly to those who find my expertise arrogant.

I'm finishing a book on the history of Canadian trade policy that I hope will be published by UBC Press early next year. I'm just finishing the manuscript.

The theme that comes through there is the increasing transparency in trade negotiations. The very big difference between the negotiations of the pre-war and the post-war periods is that in the post-war period there has been an increasing preoccupation on the part of the government with consultations with or the engagement of other parts of society.

I think the big breakthrough was the Tokyo Round negotiations of the GATT in the 1970s, when the government determined it had to involve, in a very direct way, the provinces, the business community, labour, and so on, and invited them to participate in the policy formation process. I think that continued through the FTA and the NAFTA, and it's continuing now.

The resources devoted to this by the government, to making things more transparent, more available, and so on, are quite expensive. I think the Internet has made it a much easier process, but it has also made it easier to disseminate stuff that's not helpful. That's part of managing the transparency process.

For those who are not satisfied with the degree of transparency, I recommend they spend $800 taking out a subscription to Inside U.S. Trade, which apparently is able to put flies on walls in all kinds of rooms and can get information that even other governments don't always know. In fact, they read Inside U.S. Trade to see what's really going on in the U.S. It's an excellent source of material, and I can tell you it is much more accurate than Peter Morton.

Mr. Pat O'Brien: So I take it there are no negotiations more transparent than the current ones, then, Mr. Chairman.

On the question of precedence, because the Francophonie met in Canada, there have been other major international meetings in Canada. With all due respect to Professor Brunelle, they may not have been exactly like this one, but there have been such major international meetings in Canada. And let's be candid: host premiers of those meetings, to my understanding, were never asked to address those conferences where the leaders gathered, including the Prime Minister of Canada.

Is that correct or incorrect, Mr. Hart? Do you know?

Mr. Michael Hart: On these occasions, there are really two issues. One is whether, when you're holding it in a particular city on a particular province, the host mayor or the host premier has an opportunity to make a welcoming statement, taking great pride in the fact that his or her locale is hosting it. I've seen that quite frequently in international gatherings, but I have very little experience of a subnational speaker making a presentation on substance to such a conference.

Mr. Pat O'Brien: Okay, thank you. Did Mr. MacKay—

A voice: [Inaudible—Editor].

A voice: That's irrelevant.

The Chair: We're going to go to Mr.... Perhaps I could ask a question very quickly, because now we're going around. Everybody else is into their second crack at it, so I want to ask a couple of fairly technical questions first.

The first is perhaps not technical, Mr. Hart, but you said—and I think you were very right in saying it—that this is going to be WTO plus or whatever. If we just go in and get what we get out of the WTO, there's no point going into this exercise. We have the WTO, so we want to look at what's the plus.

Where does that take us in terms of the WTO negotiations? You gave us a timeframe that would see us starting serious negotiations five years from now, and which would presumably take another three or four years. It would be nine years from today before we conclude this. So where do we go? Meanwhile, the WTO is going to be going down its track, too, and it may jump over these negotiations. What's the concordance or convergence between the two systems, and what do we do about that?

And what should we be doing as a committee? That seems to me to be a recommendation that we might want to look at, colleagues. If we're going to be doing these two things at once, what's the convergence here, and why are we expending our energies on both when one might do, etc.? What's your recommendation there?

Mr. Michael Hart: This is a very big question, which I think you also posed to my colleague Bill Dyment last week on these kinds of issues.

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The Chair: We're not trying to catch you out on an inconsistency. We've already forgotten the questions we asked, that's the problem.

Mr. Michael Hart: Mr. Dyment and I are both totally released from our obligations as former civil servants, so we can say anything we jolly well please. We're free, even on stuff we've written together and published.

There are two agendas at play here. One is the old, traditional liberalization agenda. As Don MacKay indicated, there's a lot of activity within the Americas on a bilateral basis, on a subregional basis, and so on, to complete that traditional agenda of liberalizing the tariff, of putting in place the kinds of things the OECD governments have put in place for quite some time through the GATT and now the WTO. That's a kind of completion of the liberalization agenda.

The much more difficult agenda that has now been engaged is what we call the positive agenda. That is, it is dealing with domestic regulatory issues, which together are a much more complicated issue. I think it's going to be some time before governments get their minds fully around that particular issue.

Through that process of bilateral and subregional accords, I think we will continue to make progress on that traditional agenda, on that liberalization agenda. If at some point it's possible to put that all together and to say we have made some progress, we have now completed the liberalization process in the Americas, and we are going to call that the free trade area of the Americas, that's a very good thing. It will fit very well with whatever is going on in the WTO.

The more difficult issue, which I think will not be successfully engaged at the FTAA level but must be engaged at the global level, is the second agenda. This second agenda really has very broad implications not just for the members of the FTAA, of the Americas, but also for the Europeans, for the Japanese, and so on. I think this agenda needs to be engaged at the global level, and any preparatory work done at the FTAA level, at the level of the Americas, is helpful to that in terms of thinking things through, in looking at possible texts, at what needs to be done.

I think the failure to launch negotiations at Seattle in 1999 occurred because there are very broad divisions on that new agenda and what it involves. The Europeans want very broad but shallow negotiations, while the Americans want much narrower, more focused, and deeper negotiations on these kinds of issues. So there are some very deep fault lines on that new set of issues, and I think the kind of intellectual spadework that's required, the political preparation that's required, and so on, have not been done.

So in my view, those issues will not be seized as negotiations for another four to five years. The ongoing subregional and regional things and so on are part of that preparatory process, and I think that in the end they will not be part of the FTAA deal.

The Chair: Thank you very much. That's helpful.

Mr. MacKay, did you have something on that issue?

Mr. Donald MacKay: I just have one additional element on that issue, Mr. Chairman.

You have to recall that within the governments and within the executive branch of governments, the people who are dealing with these issues are the same people who deal with them whether they're at a global level, at a sub-regional level, or at a bilateral level. In the larger governments, the teams are bigger, the level of expertise goes deeper, is broader, and therefore....

Over in the Lester B. Pearson Building on Sussex Drive, one may have 300 people who deal with trade policy, but they're dealing with it at a multitude of levels. For many of these countries, though, the number of officials available to the government to deal with these issues is much more limited than that. The negotiating teams in Costa Rica, for example, are much smaller and much tighter in that sense, and any of the activity they're doing on a bilateral basis, a sub-regional basis, or a multilateral basis, all gets wrapped up. The expertise is built up, new negotiators are trained, cross-cutting elements of issues are identified and are witnessed, and they therefore have an opportunity to address them in that sense.

But again, I'd just make the point that in many of these countries, like the Jamaicas of the world, the Dominicas of the world, or the El Salvadors of the world, while they have extremely competent negotiators who are skilful and second to none, they don't have an awful lot of them. This is a training ground for them in that sense.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

[Translation]

Professor Brunelle, do you have an answer to the question?

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Yes. I have two or three points to make on this subject. I may not be as optimistic as my colleagues; I do not think that we are heading towards the establishment of a universal standard at the multilateral level. On the contrary, I think that we will see a proliferation of agreements and I do not yet see how they will fit together. There is a proliferation of bilateral agreements.

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When work was being done on the MAI, a figure was bandied about, it was probably exaggerated but there was talk of 1,600 bilateral investment agreements. My colleague Hart referred to a proliferation of regional agreements. There is an increasing number of those. At the same time, some of the partners wished to position themselves at an intermediate level, for example at the level of the Americas. I think that the situation will become more complex rather than more simple. In this respect, it is worth remembering something that is not very well known, namely that there are still FTA standards, from the bilateral agreement, in NAFTA. In other words, NAFTA did not completely replace the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

So in my opinion, this convergence or homogeneity does not seem to be occurring in reality at the present time and what we are actually witnessing is a proliferation of agreements at all levels.

Another thing that will probably add force to this agreement is that when we came out of the first cycle of GATT, the main issue was the negotiation of lower tariff barriers around the circulation of goods. Later on, the lid was lifted from the Pandora's box of non-tariff barriers for negotiation. Then, services were added. Now, the notion of service is being increasingly extended. We are also dealing now with the notions of intellectual property and extension as well. The same applies to investment. Therefore, I believe that as we prepare for these agreements, new issued arise and the idea of convergence or simplification is simply not borne out.

The basic issue is whether this universal order will be, and I come back to what I said previously, essentially and solely a commercial order or whether there will be still other values outside those of commerce, that will prevail. That is the fundamental question.

[English]

The Chair: That's the one we're trying to come to grips with around here, that's for sure.

[Translation]

Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Obhrai, and then Dr. Patry.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai (Calgary East, Canadian Alliance): I want to welcome David from Calgary. I'm from Calgary, as you know, so welcome. It's not that we're ignoring you. Your presentation was noted, so thank you.

Michael, I would like to say you are welcome here. We really appreciate your testimony. We definitely don't share the view of the other members. There are members on this committee who are fascinated by your experience in the trade field, as well as MacKay's. It's a very interesting point. I think that's the crux of the issue, because I was in Seattle for WTO, and that was what you call the positive democratic agenda—

Mr. Michael Hart: Is that what you say?

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Positive democratic—

Mr. Michael Hart: Not democratic, but positive rule-making, as compared to agreeing not to do certain things. In the new agenda governments are agreeing to do things in a particular way, which is much more difficult.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Although issues are being raised and demonstrations are taking place, and these are the other issues not related to trade, labour, human rights, and environment, I'm finding it a little difficult having it put on the trade.... It's for debate. If an issue's debatable, where should it be addressed?

I want to ask you a question I've been looking at. Why is it that the United Nations does not take a leading role in the issues of labour, environment, and human rights? It seems to me that we, as the government, have allowed the United Nations off its responsibility, while it has a huge bureaucracy to handle these issues.

Perhaps you can say that GATT was a consensus basis organization, which really wasn't moving anywhere until you put an enforcement mechanism into it. ILO and the UNEP are in the same boat, where it's a consensus thing and there's no enforcement mechanism. What you see over there is a toothless agency, and the others who are trying to get this agenda on are only using the trade body because it has a mechanism. Why are we not giving this mechanism to those organizations and, at the end of the day, tying, like a flow chart, some sort of rules on this thing?

We have the ministers of labour, the ministers of environment, we have whole departments and bureaucracies—why can they not carry on? Why is it thrown on this? What would be your view on that issue?

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Mr. Michael Hart: Let me make a couple of points on what you said.

I think one of the biggest challenges that governments are facing in trying to respond to the issue of deepening global integration and so on is how shall that deepening global integration be governed.

In the case of trade, I would not characterize the GATT as having been an agreement that only became real in 1995, with the enforcement mechanism. I think the period from 1947 to 1994 shows a kind of increasing confidence by governments in that rule of law, in their willingness to live by the rules that were in the GATT and so on. That confidence was then finally implemented in more detail in the WTO, with its enforcement mechanisms, through the DSU. So it's a kind of a gradual process of confidence in that agreement.

The next issue now is to what extent should that become the focus for all kinds of other international governance, for all kinds of other rule-making. There already exists within the international system quite a lot of rule-making in the area of human rights, in the area of labour rights, and in the area of environmental rules. In fact, if you look at the ILO, the ILO has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 172 different conventions dealing with all kinds of standards in the area of labour standards and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 70,000 discrete standards which the members of the ILO have agreed to implement.

The issue is governments are not as willing to implement those obligations as they have been willing to implement their trade obligations. So the real issue is are governments prepared to use the instruments of enforcement that are now part of the trade agreement, and use that to enforce obligations in other areas of international cooperation, whether it be human rights or labour, or the environment and so on. That's a very profound question, to which governments are at this stage not willing to give an answer because there are arguments on both sides of that particular issue.

I think it's a very challenging issue, a very difficult one, and I think that until governments are ready to answer this question, we're going to see a lot of debate and a lot of different arguments being put forward and so on, because it is profound. This is because you are really entering a new stage of international governance, a stage of international governance wherein the very people who want these kinds of things are saying they don't like it in other areas where they say that governments have given up too much sovereignty and so on. At the same time, without pausing for breath, they say they'd like governments to give up more sovereignty in these particular areas, which indicates, I think, the complexity of the issue and the confusion that surrounds international discussion of it.

Mr. Donald MacKay: I want to follow up on what Michael said.

Last night I returned from a trip overseas, or at least out of the country, and I went to the ILO website and pulled off the current list of ratifications of what are considered to be the seven core ILO conventions. It's a two-page list listing all of the countries of the western hemisphere. You look down that list and you find that Canada, for example, has ratified and signed four out of the seven. It has not ratified three out of the seven, including the minimum age convention of 1973. The United States has ratified one out of the seven.

The reasons behind each national decision to ratify or not to ratify, apply or not apply, are probably varied and complex. It's an area in which I am not an expert, but I do know that this sort of information exists out there.

Similarly, in international or multilateral environmental agreements, there are about 200 MEAs, as they're called, multilateral environmental agreements, of which 20 have trade provisions included within them. You can take the Basel Convention on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal, for example.

When national governments agree that some of those trade provisions or those agreements with trade provisions in them should be respected and enforced in the trade agreements, you will find a cross-reference. The NAFTA text, which is sitting in front of Michael, makes reference to the Montreal Convention, the Basel Convention, etc. Governments make those decisions.

Whether trade agreements are the appropriate place to enforce agreements reached among governments in other areas is an interesting question. It's an interesting debate. I've been a little bit perplexed at the fact that the debate itself has not evolved. It's simply been a cry that you have to have labour rights in a trade agreement. To me, I don't see why it ipso facto has to be in a trade agreement, but certainly it's an idea worth considering. It may be a good idea, it may be a bad idea. We won't know until we actually consider it.

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As Michael has said, if part of the concern rests on the so-called faceless, nameless bureaucrats in Geneva making decisions, is really what these groups are after a situation where that would be expanded into a labour area or an environmental area? Maybe that is the approach to take. I don't know. It's certainly worth looking at.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: What is your opinion on that? That's the question.

Mr. Donald MacKay: No, I don't think it's a very good idea at all.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: That's the question.

Mr. Donald MacKay: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Dr. Patry.

[Translation]

Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My question is for Mr. Brunelle.

Mr. Brunelle, you represent the Réseau québécois sur l'intégration continentale. You are appearing here this morning in that capacity. Your group is one of the co-organizers of the parallel summit.

After hearing Ms. Robinson and the other panelists this morning, we realize that the Quebec Summit is actually just one stop in the long process leading to the FTAA but that it is a very important summit because there will certainly be final declarations made by prime ministers on the subject of democracy and connectivity. Ms. Robinson told us this morning in her conclusion that Canada was not ready for this summit which portrays itself as a non-trade summit and she gave us a number of suggestions. In this second parallel summit all sorts of important issues will be raised, among others, human rights and the protection of the environment.

My question is as follows. How will this summit operate and who will the participants be? You already mentioned that there would be unions and that is a good thing. Will all the FTAA countries be represented at this meeting or will it be only the big participants like Brazil, Mexico, Canada and the United States? Are negotiations underway at the present time among the various partners to reach a certain consensus so that final statements can also issue from this second summit? And if there are negotiations, what are the subjects at the present time?

That is my question.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Do I have a few hours to answer Mr. Patry's question or is it a quick reply you want?

Mr. Bernard Patry: We have two minutes to ask our questions; we don't have much time.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: Let me clarify a point, Mr. Chairman. The Réseau québécois sur l'intégration continentale, with its Canadian sister-organization, Common Frontiers, received a mandate to organize the Second Summit of the Peoples of the Americas. I'll come back to this in a moment, but I wanted to make this clear. It is not the only parallel event in Quebec City. There is a whole range of them. I previously mentioned a figure. There will be between 25,000 and 40,000 people. There will not be as many events, of course, but there will certainly be several parallel activities.

The activity we are organizing is very specific. It is the Second Summit of the Peoples of the Americas, the first having taken place in San Diego immediately after the Second Summit of the Americas. It was essentially the same structure. At the present time, there are certain networks in the Americas. There are four in North America. There is one in the United States, ART, the Alliance for Responsible Trade. There is also one in Mexico. You are right, there are networks in the big countries. There is one in Brazil, and one that is being set up in Argentina. There is one in Peru. There are participants from the 35 countries of the Americas and it is important to note this. How is it that there are 35? Mainly because there are also sectoral organizations, for example, ORIT and an organization of farmers of the Americas. There is a full group from Central America, etc.

We are expecting 2,300 participants in the Summit of the Peoples. This Summit of the Peoples fully replicates the process of the Americas, functioning very much as the San Diego meeting, on the basis of a group of forums. There is a women's forum. This time the women have decided to hold their forum for a full day on the 16th, before the others, so that they can be integrated to the subsequent forums. There is a parliamentary forum. There's the forum on human rights and another on Aboriginal peoples, I believe. It must be decided whether it will be linked with the existing one. Yesterday the press mentioned that there may perhaps be an autonomous parallel event. In any case, there was an Aboriginal forum in San Diego. There is a forum on the environment, one on labour issues, a forum on the role of the State, etc. There are nine of them planned at the present time and it is expected that a lot of work will be done because the strategy from the beginning has been to study the alternatives to what is now on the table.

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For now, what we are able to assess regarding the negotiations, are the alternatives which have been proposed or forwarded by these organizations, through their members at the domestic and internal levels and through the convergence within what Brazil proposed creating, which was this Continental Social Alliance. It is this whole process which takes place in Quebec City from April 16 to the 20th and which ends in the March of the Peoples of the Americas on the 21th, a fully peaceful march. It will be going nowhere near the security perimeter.

That is basically the strategy. The essential element of this is really work on alternatives to the current integration process in the Americas. This is perhaps what distinguishes us from pure and simple opponents or from those who are not saying anything.

Mr. Bernard Patry: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. Paquette.

Mr. Pierre Paquette (Joliette, BQ): To supplement Mr. Brunelle's information, I would like to say that I am part of the group organizing the forum for parliamentarians. Last Thursday, we sent invitations to approximately 10,000 parliamentarians from the Americas. You should have received it by now. This is an invitation that I extend to all of the members of the House, asking them to participate in this forum for parliamentarians, which will focus essentially on the role of parliamentarians and the role of civil society, which, without being the same, are complementary—there may be some debate as to that—and on how we can work together rather than against each other or separately. This is what the forum will discuss.

The Chair: May I ask you the date for this?

Mr. Pierre Paquette: April 17. It will be in Quebec City at the ENAP, the École nationale d'administration publique, and the agenda will be made public in a few hours.

My question is specifically on this subject. Of course we can say, as Mr. O'Brien did, that this is a very transparent process, however even Mr. Pettigrew's statements would imply that it could be more transparent, because he stated himself that he was prepared to make the texts public but that others did not want to. He made a number of proposals, two weeks ago, in order to improve the participation of civil society. Therefore, there are nonetheless things which can be done in order to improve the process as a whole, and particularly to involve parliamentarians.

In your opinion, what should the role of parliamentarians be in the whole negotiation process? Also, what should be the role of what is known as civil society, specifically in a context where we are acknowledging a forum for businesspeople yet where there is not an equivalent being recognized for issues that are of a more social nature? I asked the question to Mr. Lortie: why is it that we are not recognizing, for example, the Continental Social Alliance? He answered that it was because the Continental Social Alliance does not include all of the civil society groups. There are some people who are excluded and therefore this group cannot be recognized, he said, yet, the business forum was found to be sufficiently representative to be recognized in the negotiation process.

Also, I see an enormous weakness at a third level, that of the involvement of the provinces in the negotiation process. The provinces have requested an official mechanism to take part in the process, because there will no doubt be topics coming under their jurisdiction and in the end, it will be the provinces who will have to implement or not certain elements of the agreement.

I would like your comments on these three levels. I am sorry I missed your presentations. We are having a take-note debate on the Free Trade Area of the Americas this evening, and I am responsible for organizing the Bloc Québécois' participation in this debate.

[English]

Mr. Michael Hart: Let me see what I can do, because your question on the various levels of participation in this process is a very broad one.

First of all, on the participation of the member governments in this process—and I think part of the question Mr. Patry asked is for the smaller countries—this is a very large challenge. It's not difficult for countries like Canada and the United States, which have a lot of experienced people, and so on, to participate in this process. It's extremely difficult for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Honduras, and so on, countries that have a very small population base and therefore a very small government base upon which to participate in these negotiations.

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For the last four years the OAS trade unit in Washington has been conducting a pretty intensive process of training, of capacity building, and so on, for these negotiators. Mr. MacKay was very much involved in organizing those, and I was privileged to be part of the faculty.

It's interesting that over the period of the three summers that it has been completed, where they hold a course both in English and in Spanish, each of them lasting two or three weeks, I would say we've reached the point where about 200 officials from the smaller economies have now been trained in order to give them a better grasp of the kinds of issues, what the basic rules are that they should be looking at, what problems they're going to face in implementation, and so on, in order to help them participate more effectively.

They've also done that by recognizing that smaller countries are probably going to make more progress on their interests if they learn to put together coalitions. An important part of any multilateral negotiation is coalition-building, and you see a lot of coalitions in the Caribbean dealing with small-country problems, in which they have a lot in common with some of the Central Americans, and so on. But in the final analysis, these countries are obviously never going to have the resources that Canada and the United States have. So for them, part of the challenge—and that's part of what the OAS was teaching them—is that they have to be extremely well prepared in the early stages of negotiations in order to influence the agenda.

I think they're getting increasingly better at it. I've seen some pretty sophisticated participants in these negotiations. If you look, for instance, at Costa Rica, over the last 10 years it has increased its core group of trade policy experts from one in 1988 to about 15 today, and a pretty high-quality group of people. So part of the whole process has been a voyage of discover for these people and a voyage of training, and that has been very helpful.

At another level, the participation of parliamentarians in civil society and subnational levels of governance, and so on, is of a different order. I think that's more a challenge that the large countries face than the small countries. In the smaller countries, because they are smaller, there is a much more deeply held kind of core group of people who talk to one another all the time, who know each other, and the kinds of consultations that are part of the process here probably aren't necessary. So that's really a large-country challenge.

In Canada, over the last 25 or so years, we have become pretty expert at engaging the provinces in the policy-making, the consensus-building, the implementation stage, to the point where the meetings of the continuing committee on trade negotiations, which meets monthly, are a fairly good forum for engaging the provinces. There's a lot of information that goes back and forth, and a broad recognition that this is part of trade negotiations today.

The involvement of civil society is a relatively newer challenge, which I think has not yet been fully discharged. In part, it depends on your definition of civil society. There are some people who take a narrow view of it. I take a rather broad view of it—that is, the broad range of interests within a society who want to be engaged in this process, and I would include, for instance, Mr. MacInnis' part of civil society, representing a group of people who have real deep interests.

Those kinds of consultations, however, bring a fundamental problem to the front, which I think has not yet been fully grasped. It is very well put in a paper prepared for the Institute for Research on Public Policy by Dennis Stairs, who teaches at Dalhousie University. One of the things he looked at—and I think he probably talked to your chairman at length in preparing his document—is the excellent report that this committee did in the summer of 1999 on preparations for the World Trade Organization negotiations. This committee took great pains to include many different voices in society as part of its testimony and then integrated it extremely well into a final text. I think that's a model of committee reports, to engage these kinds of people.

One of the points that Professor Stairs makes, which I think is a fundamental one and a difficult one for governments to grasp, is that it's one thing to consult with a group of people who are fully engaged within the parameters of the government's negotiating position to talk about details and interests in that, and it's quite another to consult with people who are fundamentally opposed to the government's negotiating position.

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The first kind of consultation is one I think civil servants are capable of discharging. Once the government has made up its mind and cabinet has given civil servants a mandate, I think civil servants are fully competent to consult with various societal interests in order to add further detail to the negotiating position. But civil servants are not well placed to hold consultations with people who fundamentally oppose the government's position, because civil servants should not engage in that kind of political discussion. That's the kind of role this committee serves and that ministers need to engage in, because that's a very different kind of consultation.

In this country that consultation is resolved about every four years in an election, where the people of the country as a whole express their democratic view as to whether or not they're satisfied with the government's role and the government's position on various issues. In between people are free to criticize the government. In fact, the news media are always looking for people who are prepared to criticize the government. So there's no shortage of opportunities to get their views across. But that's a different kind of consultation.

I think we have seen over the past ten years that the more narrowly focused civil society groups have increasingly insisted they must have a voice in the negotiations, and there has not been, I think, a clear delineation of the nature of those consultations. I think that needs to be more clearly done.

The Chair: Thank you.

[Translation]

Professor Brunelle.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: I think that we have to look at the issue of globalization from a number of perspectives. I think that we need to applaud the growing citizen involvement. That's what we are talking about here. Yet, we are heading into a Summit of the Americas, in Quebec City, where they will be stepping up the repression of citizens. We need to make a choice. We can applaud globalization and agree with the idea that, people being better informed, more concerned and more critical, their thoughts extend beyond borders and national or domestic concerns and touch on global concerns, and I think that we have to applaud what is happening in this respect. Obviously, there will be critics who will surface from time to time and there may be some relentless critics against this globalization, but we cannot mix everything together. We must not assume that because someone expresses themselves on globalization, that they will be voting against the Liberal Party. I certainly do not think that we should follow that type of reasoning.

We are dealing with something here. People are concerned, there is a growth in the concerns of people with respect to this issue which is growing in importance. We need to find a way to deal with this within the institutions and the organizations that exist, and not react with repression. In Quebec, they have taken the route of repression, and even though the government is completely legitimate and has been elected in a completely democratic manner, I do not think that that is enough.

Society is made up of more than just consumers. We are hearing more and more talk about globalization. Therefore, we need to applaud the fact that these people are concerned about these issues. Therefore, there is a problem with civil society. There is a problem with civil society, not only in its numbers, but also with respect to why this civil society is expressing itself right now.

I will give you two or three quick explanations. There are organizations, in this civil society, that have begun to undertake what is known as the transnationalization of their practices. This has been the case with business for centuries, however this has also been the case with certain organizations, specifically labour organizations, without naming any. Add to this a proliferation of organizations which share these concerns, which is perfectly respectable, incidentally. However we also need to recognize that civil society has a reactive dimension, and that is what you are responsible for. I believe that civil society is becoming more and more important and more and more demanding as a result of the fact that the debate on the issues is beyond our grasp, there is no more debate on these issues, and the requirement of transparency is being sidestepped.

I do not know how to put it into practice. I am only trying to draw your attention to the importance of this issue. When members of Parliament and parliamentarians themselves are not privy to the information, then you are feeding—and I agree one hundred percent with what has been said—a whole series of concerns and misconceptions, often a bit hysterical, on what is happening. Yet, is there no one who is responsible for these consequences? Can we not deal with these consequences?

Perhaps we need to imagine a new relationship between parliamentarians and civil society. Perhaps this is where we are heading. There are more and more civil society organizations being accredited by ECOSOC, and by the WTO. This is not at all the case in the Americas. Is this a good thing? This type of question needs to be discussed.

You were discussing the consequences of all this earlier. I listened carefully to Mr. MacKay, earlier, who was asking questions about the weaknesses in a whole series of environmental, labour and social standards in the world. Perhaps this is a result of the weakness of the mechanism. Why is it that trade standards have been so easily integrated and approved—there are fairly strong punishments in this field—whereas on the other side, there aren't? I think we need to ask ourselves these questions. We do not have solutions. We need to ask these questions.

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Finally, I want to talk about provincial participation. The same type of comments that I made earlier on the participation of parliamentarians are called for on this issue also. Should parliamentarians always be involved only after the fact? Should you only be able to express your opinion when the agreement is tabled? Couldn't we find a way to think about, develop and make suggestions on it before the fact, before it's too late?

We are now facing new challenges. I think that returning to old, formal solutions is no longer enough. Some people lament the fact that civil society is becoming increasingly important and that debates now take place in the street and in society. However, I don't think that we should be too sorry about this shift. When you look at it from a broader perspective, you see that it is a relatively remarkable success.

Don't you think that we should develop this new system and advocate open discussion fora and discussion of these issues? In a world where people are required to be increasingly educated, it is quite unjustified to then ask them to refrain from expressing their opinion and simply to await the material benefits of negotiations which will get input at other levels.

Consequently, I think that a certain number of questions should be asked here. This soul-searching must be comprehensive and serious enough to enable us to move away from the current relatively shortsighted vision, whereby an elected government is deemed democratic and whereby people have to wait four years to change that government. We have to move away from the idea that until there's a change of government, nothing happens and everyone has to put up with it. I think that these are rather basic comments given the complexity of the issues and the quite justifiable concerns expressed by people who find themselves in the dark. I think that it is amazing.

I would like to point out to Mr. Hart, that on the issue of transparency, an interesting book—that you could perhaps even read if you have the time—was published by Senator Moynihan a few years ago. He gave it the rather nice title Secrecy: The American Experience.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you. I think that everyone has asked a question.

I would like to make one comment to you, Mr. Brunelle. Even some Liberal members of Parliament have a problem with globalization.

Mr. Dorval Brunelle: I am very happy to hear it.

The Chair: You are not alone.

Secondly, I think that your comment on the role of members of Parliament is spot-on. However, as professor Hart stated, in my time as a member of Parliament, many studies have been conducted before the fact. This was the case for the MAI, for example. The MAI was considered in committee, even while the negotiations were still going on. The committee laid out its recommendations before the Canadian government returned to the negotiating table. The government took onboard our comments. The same thing happened for the WTO. We tabled our report before the Seattle summit. The same thing happened for the FTA. A report on the FTA was tabled. However, I do indeed agree with you that there is still work to be done here. This is an issue that will require further consideration. To some extent, that was the goal of today's meeting.

I hope that after the Summit of the Americas, we will have comments that we will compile in a report. I hope that we will be able to draw on our expertise and that of Mr. Paquette and his colleagues of the Parliamentary summit, etc.

I would go so far as to say that it is not only the public service that develops know-how. Parliamentarians provide specific know-how within committees, such as ours, and in other committees that I worked with, and in other countries also. The whole issue of integration is very important and it is our duty to be up-to-date with the issues, and consequently, we are very responsive to your comments and your thoughts.

[English]

Mr. MacInnis, thank you for coming from Calgary. We didn't get into intercontinental energy policy today. Perhaps that's just as well. Maybe we'll leave that for another day.

Mr. MacKay, Professor Brunelle, and Professor Hart, thank you all very much for coming. We appreciate your observations, and I know they'll be very helpful to us in finishing our preparations. Thank you.

We're adjourned, colleagues, until 3:30 this afternoon. I remind you we have a long list of witnesses this afternoon as well, so let's have short questions. Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.