SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 170 - Mar/21/23

Mr. Arif Virani (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development, Lib.)

Mar/21/23 11:20:38 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, building on my friend's intervention, I will take the occasion today to wish all Ismaili Canadians a very happy Navroz Mubarak, the start of the new year and the first day of spring. I appreciate the speech given by my colleague who sits on the Standing Committee on International Trade with me and who, as I mentioned, was with me in Paris. First, I want to point out that the only difference between Bill S‑211 and Bill C‑282 from the Bloc Québécois is their place on the Order Paper. There is a chronological order to be followed. Next, I agree entirely that the regulations, directives and strategies established by the House and the government must apply to every company and every institution, particularly Export Development Canada. I would like to ask a question about something that was raised in Canada's strategy for responsible business conduct abroad. I am quoting from the document: The July 2020 amendment to the Customs Tariff prohibits the importation of goods that are mined, manufactured or produced wholly or in part by forced labour.... Furthermore, the government is committed to enacting legislation to eradicate forced labour from Canadian supply chains and ensure that Canadian businesses operating abroad do not contribute to human rights abuses.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Mar/21/23 11:22:16 a.m.
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A question in excess of two minutes is a bit long. The hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot.

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Mr. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

Mar/21/23 11:22:21 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague. I really enjoy working with him on this issue. We will always applaud any step in the right direction, but we also have a duty to point out that we think the bill is too timid. That is also part of democracy, debate in the House and political debate on this matter. However, I disagree with my colleague about the nature of the differences between the two bills. I do not have the time to repeat everything I said, but I did go over the differences, which are mainly the size of the businesses and the sectors they work in, the revenue thresholds and the requirements imposed. I believe that there are many differences between the bills, and they are not purely symbolic. Therefore, I would again urge the government to place Bill C-262 in the order of precedence. We are very enthusiastic about this idea.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, CPC)

Mar/21/23 11:23:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Dufferin—Caledon did his job and looked into the matter. He submitted a written question to the government. Question No. 1112 asked whether the Canada Border Services Agency had intercepted any goods from the Xinjiang region of China that were made or produced using forced labour, and, if so, how many times since 2016. The answer was zero. Because that answer came from the government, I would like the committee whose report we are debating in the House to look into that. Since we know the answer is zero and no products have been intercepted at our borders since 2016, what more can we do, as opposition members, to force the government to direct the CBSA to do its job?

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Mr. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

Mar/21/23 11:24:18 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, in order for there to be political will, there must also be funding. I would say that the issue lies at the top, which is to say that we need real investigative and auditing bodies like the ones I listed. We need a commission that is empowered to take action in this area, and we need to give real powers to the ombudsperson, whose role is a total joke at the moment. It is a joke, but this is no laughing matter. This has to be backed up by money and diplomacy. Oversight bodies must not encourage these practices. They need to foster a culture of accountability, not impunity.

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Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)

Mar/21/23 11:25:05 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. I come from mining country. Over the years, we have seen the fight to have some of the highest environmental standards, the safest working conditions and workers who are paid good wages for the work they do. However, we know that Canadian companies do not have this reputation in the global south. In fact, there are a number of Canadian companies that are mythic companies in Canada but have been accused of some horrific human rights violations. I think of the 2016 report by Osgoode Hall Law School, “The Canada Brand”, which identified 44 murders, 403 attacks and 700 cases of targeting of indigenous people in Latin America to pursue Canadian mining interests. We know the horrific story of what happened to the women in Guatemala and the allegations of rape at Hudbay Minerals. Does my colleague support the ability of survivors of this kind of abuse to take their cases to Canadian courts to hold these companies accountable under Canadian law?

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Mr. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

Mar/21/23 11:26:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, yes, I definitely do. I would also say that this goes to the heart of what we have always advocated for. It goes to the heart of the motion I sought unanimous consent to move, to no avail. It goes to the heart of the petition I tabled in the House last June. It goes to the heart of the two NDP bills that I co-sponsored and wholeheartedly supported and that I am mentioning again today to remind everyone that they exist, because they are still at the introduction stage. Yes, we definitely need to do this. It is urgent. Right now, the ombudsperson has no powers and her position is symbolic. All she can say is that if there are any human rights violations, go to her well-designed website. That is a problem.

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Mr. Tom Kmiec

Mar/21/23 11:26:56 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, when we talk about results, we really mean what we expect from the CBSA and all government agencies. I hear the member talking about another ombudsperson, and it reminds me of what members on the government side are saying. They talk about statements, meetings, quotes on websites, updates to websites or meetings they have had in other countries about this, but they do not talk about results. An Order Paper question was tabled in the House, as was an answer, which said that no goods produced using forced labour have been intercepted and sent back to Beijing in the People's Republic of China. The question is therefore whether the government takes this seriously. My question for the member is whether he would agree that, on this issue, what really matters are the results, the execution.

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Mr. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

Mar/21/23 11:27:50 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, clearly, if there is no result, the means were insufficient. This goes without saying. The intention and the results must often be judged separately. People had been calling for the creation of an ombudsperson for a very long time but, in the end, it amounted to very little. It is disappointing, but it is what it is. I would like to thank the Conservatives for putting this question on the Order Paper, because it was very educational and allowed us to attach a number to this reality, or rather a lack of a number. I would not say that nothing is being taken seriously, especially since the sponsor of Bill C-243 is someone who is working hard on this file. I will not question his honesty on this issue and on the file. He has been moving motions on this issue for a long time. He proposed something similar during the Harper government, and it was his own party that did not support it in large enough numbers. However, it obviously does not go far enough. The fact is that no goods are being sent back, and that number speaks for itself.

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Ms. Louise Chabot (Thérèse-De Blainville, BQ)

Mar/21/23 11:28:59 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleague for his speech. I thought it was very striking. He explained what the bill would address and, more importantly, what it would not. The answer is that it will not change anything. I understand that this bill will not fix what is happening in the textile industry and the supply chains. Members will recall that, 10 years ago, 1,000 people died in a textile factory in Bangladesh. These events triggered a social awakening and opened our eyes to the work women do in abhorrent conditions. How can we actually address that in a bill?

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès)

Mar/21/23 11:29:52 a.m.
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The member for Saint‑Hyacinthe—Bagot has 10 seconds to answer the question.

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Mr. Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

Mar/21/23 11:29:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is impossible for me to answer in 10 seconds. I would simply encourage my colleague to read Bill C-262 and Bill C-263, which contain all kinds of provisions that respond to that. I think everything is in there.

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Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)

Mar/21/23 11:30:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in the House. I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West. The fact that we have to discuss, in 2023, the need to stop slave labour products from entering Canada is a very telling indicator of where we are in the world right now. Of course, the focus of the Conservatives is the horrific treatment of the Uighurs in China, but we need to broaden this to look at the global race to the bottom that has led to such massive exploitation of environment, indigenous people and the rights of working people around the world. What we are talking about is the dark side of globalization. Five years ago it would have been heresy to question the great myth of globalization, but that was before COVID and the fact that the supply chains were not able to withstand it, that we could not provide our frontline medical workers with proper PPE because we did not have the factory capacity. This was due to the fact that we had offshored all these basic things that a country needed to keep itself safe to the lowest common denominators and to the sweatshops in the global south. Before, with globalization, we were told that it would lift all boats. It certainly lifted some boats. It lifted the superyachts, but it was always about freeing the power of capital to live and move wherever it wanted without obligation, the environmental or legal obligations in the jurisdictions they worked within. In fact, globalization was about limiting the power of countries and regions to protect their interests. We know what happened when Mexico tried to stop toxic chemicals. It was targeted because that was supposedly unfair to trade. We are now at a point where the global supply chain is using slave labour. This is not some dark, obscure fact. All one has to do is go to any shopping mall and into any of the big stores. We know the companies that have been named as being complicit in slave labour, companies such as Adidas, Carter's, Gap, General Motors, Google, Bosch, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, Dell. Those are just a few of the 83 that have been identified. Those corporations have their products in all our stores. I find it interesting that the Conservative focus is that we should try to work with our international allies to deal with this somehow, as opposed to saying to these companies that if they deal with slave labour, they get charged, end of story. What we see here, again, is this myth of the race to the bottom, that somehow people are surprised that we would end up with slave labour. I go back to the free trade debate with Brian Mulroney. In that original free trade debate, it was argued that if we merged our environmental and labour standards with the United States, we would all be better off. Of course, we saw a huge bleed-off of manufacturing jobs. At least with the United States, we were dealing with comparable economies. However, it was Clinton and Mulroney's decision to extend it to Mexico that was the real indicator, because Mexico had much lower wage standards. It did not have the protection of laws that Canadian and American workers had. Once the free trade agreement was set with Mexico, we saw the setting up of the maquiladora sections, where these companies just moved across the border and were protected under Mexican law from all kinds of obligations to pay proper wages, to pay even properly into the Mexican system. It was the race to the bottom. Our country signed on right then, and 766,000 U.S. jobs moved over the border into Mexico, to low-wage maquiladora plants. It is interesting that those plants were also locations where horrific numbers of young women were being found murdered and sexually mutilated. If we are creating disposable products, we somehow are creating disposable people. We have never actually dealt with that. From the model that they had with the maquiladora section set up in Mexico was the idea to offshore to the global south. Remember Jean Chrétien and the great China initiative? It was not that we were going to be able to sell our furniture into the world's biggest market. This was about capital being able to offshore its jobs. The company known at that time for the biggest drive of going to American and Canadian corporations and saying that they could make more money by shutting down their operations and shifting that work over to places like India or China was McKinsey; McKinsey that is now getting $100 million in contracts from the federal government; McKinsey being the company that has been called the single biggest factor in the destruction of the American working and middle class. What we saw in the move to shift work to low-wage jurisdictions without legal accountability or legal standards was the race to the bottom, and it became more severe as economic precarity grew in North America. We ended up with a situation like, for example, Joe Fresh. I spoke about it earlier today. Joe Fresh and Loblaws were selling cheap clothing. People could pay $2 for shirts for their kids. These were being made in sweatshops in Bangladesh in horrific conditions. A collapse of one of these sweatshop factories killed 1,135 human beings. Those human beings died because of corporate negligence. Another 2,500 people were injured. There was no accountability for Loblaws, which makes record profits, or for Joe Fresh. They paid $150 per person and walked away. That is astounding. We know the story of Apple, the very cool iPhone company, and of its people working in sweatshops in China. Workers were so mistreated that they started to kill themselves in such numbers that the contractor put nets out to try to catch them from jumping. That is a degrading, despicable race to the bottom, yet there was no accountability. Apple remained the cool company. In fact, speaking of Apple, if people have its phone, when they pick the phone up, they are picking up at least a ton of rock. That is what it takes to make a phone. That ton of rock is coming out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is coming out of the slave labour conditions in the Congo. Our supply chains have not even addressed that. We need to start talking about the corporate accountability and responsibility for allowing this race to the bottom to happen. What has it meant for the jobs that used to be here? I will quote from the RAND Corporation, not exactly a left-wing think tank. It has worked for the U.S. military for the last half century or much longer. RAND looked at the growth of inequality in the United States and it identified, from the 1980s, that $50 trillion from the savings and wages of the working and middle class was transferred to the upper class, the 1%. RAND says that this is the equivalent of $1,144 for every worker for every month for four decades. That is what created the growing political inequality in the United States, the growing uncertainty and the anger out there. We have to address in the House accountability for what happened that allowed globalization to shift responsibility, to shift work to brutal, underfunded conditions where people are exploited, while undermining the middle and working class in North America. To do that, we need corporate accountability. If subcontractors commit crimes against people in the Global South, they need to be held accountable for it. If they are using slave labour and selling those items in malls, they need to be held accountable for it. Canadians expect that. They also expect that corporations are going to be held accountable for this offshoring of work to sweatshops, the slave labour conditions and the brutality that we have seen over the last few decades. The time has come where we have to start to shift back to corporate responsibility, environmental responsibility and fair labour standards.

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Mr. Arif Virani (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development, Lib.)

Mar/21/23 11:39:48 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member posed some questions earlier with respect to identifying issues that were much broader than just one particular part of the world. In fact, there are human rights violations occurring throughout the planet for which people need to be held accountable. I know him to also be a strong advocate for indigenous rights. What has changed in the last four to five years is that we have attorn to the international convention UNDRIP. We have also domesticated that agreement by passing legislation in this chamber, on which he, I and many others in this chamber voted. With respect to UNDRIP, it talks to specific rights that are ascribed to indigenous people. I want to put one of those rights to him and ask him whether that kind of promise and legislation can help fulfill the protection of human rights violations that relate to indigenous communities abroad. Article 26, paragraph 1, in the text of UNDRIP says, “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.” Does that kind of legislative mechanism, which is now passed into law in Canada, provide him with some of the potential for enforcement of the rights of indigenous persons abroad who are affected by Canadian enterprises that are operating and violating their rights?

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Mr. Charlie Angus

Mar/21/23 11:41:07 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we certainly need to have a fair playing field, and one of them is the rights of indigenous people to participate in resource development and the right to say no. We cannot have armed gangs, threats and intimidation, like we saw with the horrific allegations against Hudbay Minerals in Guatemala. There has to be legal accountability for such measures. In Canada, for example, the Ring of Fire, could be a massive benefit, economically, but the Neskantaga First Nation, which has gone 28 years without clean drinking water, has not been consulted by anybody on this. This is highly problematic. We have the opportunity in Canada to create a standard for the development of critical minerals by using high environmental standards, indigenous consent, indigenous support, and we cannot allow that to be weakened. This should be the Canada brand that allows us to meet the challenges of an environmentally sensitive future. We need to be pushing for this.

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Mr. René Villemure (Trois-Rivières, BQ)

Mar/21/23 11:42:15 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. It was extremely important. It is sad that we have come to a point where we need to legislate something as important as this. What sorts of controls would my colleague recommend for companies that do not already have basic ethical standards in place to self-regulate in such cases?

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Mr. Charlie Angus

Mar/21/23 11:42:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, one of the really disturbing signs was the Joe Fresh lawsuit in Canada. What happened was horrific. It was thrown out by Justice Paul Perell, who, by the way, has not had a great record with the survivors of St. Anne's residential school. However, that is a side issue. The fact that corporations are allowed to make this kind of money and there is no accountability for the conditions that led to over 1,000 people dying is outrageous. It is the same with the issue of Hudbay Minerals in Guatemala. It has to be held accountable in a Canadian court. Once these corporations are held accountable under Canadian law, not under Bangladeshi law, or Guatemalan law or anywhere else, we will see these activities end, and we will start to see higher standards.

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Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Mar/21/23 11:43:31 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I wish I could have stood and cheered at every syllable of the speech by the member for Timmins—James Bay, because it is exactly right. We lived through an era, particularly through the 1990s, of triumphalism of transnational corporate rule. That included the World Trade Organization rules that we were not permitted to ask “Was this product made by child labour?” That was called a process and production method, PPM. We were not supposed to be able to look behind where the carpets came from that were made in India, or where our chocolate bars that we give our children on Halloween came from. Did slave children pick those cocoa beans? Probably yes, over and over again. There is slave trade in the shrimp that we buy at the grocery store. There is slave trade in the chocolate bars that we are still buying. When do we get rid of these pernicious rules that protect human slavery?

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Mr. Charlie Angus

Mar/21/23 11:44:35 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, again, one of the dark falsehoods of globalization was that it was going to bring freedom. When China was allowed into the WTO, Bill Clinton said “The genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle.” We saw what happened. This was right after the Chinese government used tanks against unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square. There is nothing naturally democratic about capitalism. Capitalism needs to be constrained.

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Mr. Brian Masse (Windsor West, NDP)

Mar/21/23 11:45:10 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will start with a bit of acknowledgement of the member for Timmins—James Bay's work domestically with the Canada pension plan and ethics reviews, which are very important. When we think about the Canada pension plan, it goes back to Pat Martin, a former NDP colleague. For many years, he said that we actually need to have green and ethical screening of our investments for the Canada pension plan. For those Canadians who are tuning in right now, it is disgraceful that, to this day, our Canada pension plan has actually supported child labour and invested in everything from guns to tobacco and other types of endeavours that would be seen as reprehensible. We continue to have this arm's-length approach to how we use the public funds from many people who are activists against this use and many investors in Canada; this actually includes investments into small and medium-sized businesses, which have to compete globally for our own investments that we have in endeavours of such a nature. Coming from an industrial town in Windsor-Essex County, I have seen our job losses at the expense of using child and forced labour. This includes not only the abuse of those individuals but also ethnic cleansing and other types of imperialism that other countries use labour for. Many times, this has been through investors coming from our country, so we have actually undermined ourselves. I have been at meetings where, for example, unions from Mexico have come down and said not to allow the investments because there is abuse of their women, children and men. There is a short-term gain from jobs through exploitation versus what would be a long-term gain from the proper investment and necessary humanitarian advancements. Finally, the member for Elmwood—Transcona has carried on the amazing work of his father, Bill Blaikie, in this chamber. Thanks to this, with the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement, we got at least some type of a labour and environmental lens that can be applied. However, we see how fragile that is; in this last number of weeks, even the United States has been identified with problems on labour and using children. This includes the Ford Motor Company, which is founded, in many respects, in my riding across from Detroit, Michigan. These are real things that are happening because we do not impress upon investors the right, necessary standards or do the routine things we should. I want to transition a bit to talk about one of those routine things, which is with our Customs and Immigration Union. I was here at the beginning, when they used to actually use students to cover their employment breaks at the border. In this past year, we have again seen the government not taking the contract or the types of necessary supports very seriously. When we talk about the CBSA and our men and women who are on the line for us every single day, we do not give them the proper supports. Today's debate, with the verbiage coming from the government side on this, is upsetting because the routine thing we could do is actually support our CBSA officers, who have had to deal with extraordinary circumstances under COVID while underfunded. In fact, this last summer they had to go into forced practices to actually have proper staffing because the government has mishandled the implementation of the right people. On top of that, it is even trying to move toward more automation as opposed to having men and women at our border as a policy. That is really what the ArriveCAN situation was. We know there was lots of discussion in the House about its mismanagement as an application on someone's phone. However, at the end of the day, this was really about the Liberals trying to defund men and women at the border. We have also seen this at airports that have moved to automation, and we are seeing it at land borders. This is unacceptable, especially when I have been fighting for over 20 years for a new border crossing here in Windsor-Essex County, the Gordie Howe International Bridge. We are finally getting it, but there is going to be a shortage of officers. Moreover, that is the best line we actually have to back up the policies that are spoken about in legislation made in the House. Why do we have underfunding at our ports? Why do we check very few of those facilities? Why do the men and women in our CBSA not have the proper technology or the right supports? I was in the House and chamber when then Liberal MP Derek Lee called them wimps. The CBSA officers were not getting the proper supports at that time, so the government did nothing to actually discredit that statement. What we did then is that we moved to a modernization process and gave them some better skills and supports. However, through successive governments, they are constantly going through contract renegotiations and often working without a contract or collective agreement, on a regular basis. That is unacceptable. If we want to do the routine things to back up what we say in the chamber, we could support our men and women at the border. That means proper identification. Those things that they can do are very much an important skill set for ending not just the issues with forced labour and trade agreements, which we do not enforce on the shipping level but arrive on our doorstep, but also public safety issues. I have done a lot of work on fraud and prevention of different types of things coming into our country. I always remember that we have a lot of different devices and types of materials coming into Canada that need to be checked regularly; it is actually important for our economy that we check them because we are competing against manufactured knock-offs and a series of different things. We cannot assume that they are just garments or clothes. The reality is that some of the knock-offs that have come into our Canadian society and even our industrial manufacturing industry include parts for hospitals, airplanes and cars. These things are getting through our system right now, but we can identify and deal with them if we have the proper training and supports. Therefore, when we talk about today's motion, we have identified this particular issue, especially with regard to the Uighurs and the genocide taking place, as well as the series of other exploitations that are very important. Here, we have to come back to what we can control, which, at this time, is supporting our CBSA officers by having proper collective agreements, having proper training facilities and doing proper staffing on a regular basis all the time. That is where we can control something and make a difference at this moment. Having words in the House and dealing with the larger corporate issues that we have less control over are things that will be challenging, but we should take them on. However, again, I have referenced the CBSA because it could be done in a heartbeat, as could the issue related to the Canada pension plan. That is a politically appointed process to get on its ethics board and actually follow through. The member for Timmins—James Bay brings up a really good point in terms of accountability, of being back on our shores here for the investments and exploitation that take place. There is no reason we could not start that in the House with our own investments as a country and as a government nation deciding how our public money is used. One of the most upsetting things about this is that those are the simple things that we can control, and yet we hear more excuses and complaints from the government having to exercise basically the systems that it has employed at its fingertips. I have regularly witnessed this, and it has always been the excuse that it is the capitalist way or the free market economy that is out there. Let us take a look at that as I wrap up here. If, at the end of the day, we want the free market economy with no regulations, then we are getting child exploitation, women's exploitation and other populations who are migrating for different reasons. Even in our country, when it comes to foreign workers coming in, there is exploitation. Therefore, it is up to us as policy-makers to make decisions to change things. If we want to just accept the free market the way it is right now, then we are literally accepting the exploitation of children, women and migrant workers as the status quo. That is unacceptable from my standpoint as a New Democrat, and I think it is unacceptable for most members in this chamber. However, at the end of the day, it takes real action on what we have that is controllable instead of complaining about the things we cannot control.

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