CIIT Committee Report

SUPPLEMENTARY OPINION OF THE BLOC QUÉBÉCOIS

THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT IN NEGOTIATIONS

Blatant transparency problems

The Canada-UK Trade Continuity Agreement (Canada-UK TCA) is designed to ensure that Canada and the United Kingdom do not lose their trade flow. Canada and the European Union are bound by a free trade agreement, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA, and the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union ended the provisions that bound London and Ottawa.

The lack of transparency in the negotiations that led to this transitional agreement with the United Kingdom was glaring, which is unfortunately representative of a general lack of transparency in the negotiation of many of Canada's recent international trade agreements.

Members of the Standing Committee on International Trade discussed the transitional agreement with directly involved stakeholders without seeing any of the text. It was a theater of the absurd. We were being asked to study an agreement without knowing its content. We were given witnesses who offered comments and recommendations about the agreement, but we had no real information about the content of the agreement. We were only given to understand that the deadline was coming up very quickly because the agreement had to be passed by December 31.

We might as well say that we were being asked to sign a blank cheque to the government, when it is the same government that has sacrificed supply management three times and that, during the last free trade negotiations, abandoned fundamental Québec sectors such as aluminum and softwood lumber. For these reasons, we are not spontaneously inclined to trust him blindly.

The Committee even had to submit its report on the transitional agreement the day we received the text and before we could even read it. The Bloc Québécois was very clear on the fact that we were not going to agree to stamp an agreement without having read it or without having had the time to study and analyze it, that is, without having been able to do our work as parliamentarians.

The elected members of the House of Commons, who are responsible for defending the interests and values of their fellow citizens, must therefore be satisfied with approving agreements at the end of a process in which they will ultimately have been mere extras, despite the efforts of the Bloc Québécois, which introduced several bills on this subject between 2000 and 2004.

The agreement between the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party in 2020, in which the Deputy Prime Minister committed to providing more information to elected officials, is a step in the right direction. However, as the example of the recent agreement shows, it is clearly not enough.

Inform and consult parliamentarians and the provinces

There must be mechanisms to involve parliamentarians and the provinces in the next round of talks. It is essential that the government keep parliamentarians informed at every stage of the process. Such a requirement will reduce the risk that parliamentarians will have to vote on agreements without all the information necessary to make an informed choice. This will bring transparency to the negotiation process.

As the Bloc Québécois is calling for, Parliament must adopt procedures to increase the level of democratic control over agreements. The minister responsible for ratifying an agreement should be required to submit it to Parliament, along with an explanatory memorandum, within a sufficient timeframe. Parliamentary approval must precede any ratification.

As part of the negotiations with Europe leading to the ratification of the CETA between Canada and the European Union in 2017, Québec was able to send its representative. However, this participation in the discussions was the result of a request from the European Union, not the will of Canada. The process has never been repeated since, but it should be.

We believe it is essential that Québec and the provinces also be invited to the negotiating table, since they have the formal capacity to block the implementation of an agreement in their own jurisdictions. Québec's jurisdiction extends beyond its borders, as the Privy Council in London itself recognized in a decision rendered several decades ago that led to the establishment of the Gérin-Lajoie doctrine in Québec.

It is not perfect, of course.

During the CETA negotiations, the Québec representative stated that the role of the Québec delegation was to offer a "billet-doux" to the Canadian delegation and that its action was similar to corridor diplomacy. In other words, its role counted, but not at the table, where decisions were made.

The Bloc Québécois also regrets that a recommendation to consult the provinces before the final adoption in the House of Commons of the bill on the agreement referred to in this report was rejected by the members of the Standing Committee on International Trade. This would have allowed the government to demonstrate its commitment to transparency by implementing these consultations.

In the end, only Québec's independence will allow us to really assert our positions internationally, since the canadian negotiator will always tend to protect the various canadian economic sectors to the detriment of those in Québec.

Brexit, Canada-UK TCA and the future of Québec

Beyond the agreement, the process itself holds lessons for Québec and its independence project. The cases of the United Kingdom and Québec are of course very different. Nevertheless, the Brexit represents a first in history. It involves a state that has left a customs union to which it belonged and is therefore no longer part of certain trade agreements. In this respect, the situation is comparable to Québec. Opponents of the project, who have always played on economic fears, claimed that Québec would not automatically be a member of the trade agreements signed by Canada, and that it would be left with nothing and would have to start from scratch in terms of its partners.

Constitutional scholar Daniel Turp, a former member of the House of Commons and the Québec National Assembly, once argued that countries would apply a presumption of continuity if the new country expressed its intention to remain bound by a given treaty. However, Mr. Turp's demonstration was limited to multilateral agreements. The issue remained with respect to trade treaties.

The only precedent for a trade treaty dates back to 1973, when Bangladesh left Pakistan to become independent. Since Pakistan was bound by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Bangladesh automatically joined overnight. However, the GATT was a multilateral treaty whose wording did not need to be renegotiated to allow for a new member. What about a bilateral treaty? The British answered this question.

In summary, Canada is already a signatory to an agreement with the European Union, the CETA. In order to prevent the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union from creating a vacuum in the relationship between London and Ottawa, an interim agreement is quickly concluded between the two countries, which incorporates the content of CETA and which will remain in force in the short term until the two partners renegotiate a permanent agreement. So stability is assured until then.

The Brexit shows Québec the way forward when a trading nation gains or regains its sovereignty. A newly independent Québec would, of course, emulate this approach and quickly conclude interim agreements to ensure our businesses have access to markets while we renegotiate permanent agreements with our partners.

Far from being caught off guard, the U.K. already has trade agreements with 60 of the 70 countries with which the European Union has trade agreements. And it now has an agreement with Japan, with which the EU had no agreement.

Because they are provisional, transitional agreements do not exempt newly independent countries from returning to the negotiating table, preferably sooner rather than later. But there is no major problem with renegotiating what someone else has negotiated for us. That is what the UK would normally do this year with Canada. If we were to do so as well, we would avoid weakening sectors that are dear to Québec, such as its agriculture, its aluminum or its softwood lumber. There are many more advantages than disadvantages to defending only your own interests at the negotiating table.