We thank you for this opportunity to comment on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). We commend the National Assembly for holding public consultations on this proposed agreement, a project whose potential scope is so broad and far-reaching that it must be the subject of a thoughtful, serious and inclusive public debate throughout the Americas.
The FTAA must be understood as yet another in a long line of so-called "free trade" arrangements that undermine democracy by systematically elevating the rights of investors and corporations above those of citizens and their elected representatives. We already have more than a decade of experience with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Quebeckers and indeed all Canadians have watched the public policies that have made our societies kinder and gentler being dismantled in order that we conform to the narrow free market ideology entrenched in these agreements. Having already been forced to give up key fisheries conservation measures, access to affordable generic drugs, supports for Canadian publishing, the Auto Pact’s incentives for investment in Canadian jobs and communities, toxic fuel additive standards, research and development support for Canada’s high technology sectors, and now it seems, our right to ban bulk water exports, Quebeckers and all Canadians are clearly ready to rethink their trade policy. Negotiations on the FTAA provide an opportunity for Canada to take a new approach that places social, economic and ecological justice above the profits of multinational corporations. While unfortunately, the current federal government has not shown a willingness to take up that challenge, we urge the National Assembly to join the growing movement for a more fair and just approach to international trade negotiations.
The threat to democracy and social justice posed by the narrow free market ideology entrenched in these agreements, and in the FTAA envisaged by the federal government, is perhaps best exemplified by the way these agreements treat public services. These agreements are built on two key investor rights: (1) National Treatment – governments must treat foreign investors no less favourably than they treat domestic investors; and (2) Most Favoured Nation Treatment – a government cannot treat investors from one country any less favourably than it treats investors from any other country. When applied to service sectors such as health care or education and when combined with investor rights such as those guaranteed by chapter 11 of the NAFTA, these principles could be used by foreign corporations to gain a right to deliver on a for-profit basis health and education services that Canadians have democratically chosen to have delivered primarily on a universally accessible, non-profit basis. For instance, if after privatizing an area of its health care system, a province were to decide later that privatization had been a mistake, under NAFTA it could only go back to a public, non-profit system if it paid to foreign corporations that had moved into the sector massive compensation for lost profits. And even if effective reservations and exemptions for existing programs and regulatory frameworks were secured (and the effectiveness of such reservations remains in question), the investor rights guaranteed by these agreements may place serious obstacles in the way of a collective decision by Quebeckers to create any new universally accessible public programs. In short, these principles serve to protect the market and private corporations from interference by democratically elected governments, even where such "interference" is motivated by legitimate public policy objectives such as ensuring social equity, fairness, public safety or cultural diversity. Constraining our societies within such a narrow free market ideology is clearly inconsistent with the Canadian and Quebecois traditions, which have been characterized by the view that there is a key role for government in ensuring social justice, and in regulating and promoting economic development.
The National Assembly should be particularly concerned about the potential for an FTAA to impose additional constraints on its ability to preserve and promote Quebec’s unique culture. While the federal government has expressed its intention to seek "maximum flexibility" in the FTAA "to pursue its cultural policy objectives," we should treat such good intentions with considerable scepticism given that, despite past assurances from the federal government that Canadian cultural policies would be protected from free trade agreements, many of these policies have subsequently been struck down by both NAFTA and WTO tribunals. And given that work on a proposed new international instrument to protect cultural diversity is still in its early stages, the federal government must not be permitted to use that instrument to deflect legitimate criticism about the cultural protections afforded by an FTAA. In any case, a stand-alone cultural instrument could only be effective in protecting cultural diversity if culture, and cultural industries, were fully carved out of the FTAA and other trade agreements. We urge the National Assembly to take a strong position on protecting cultural diversity in the proposed FTAA.
Another area of concern is the fundamental imbalance between corporate and citizen rights that the federal government has proposed for the FTAA. In outlining its negotiating position, the federal government has made it clear that it is seeking enforceable protections for the trade and investment liberalization provisions of an FTAA; it wants compliance with trade and investment rules to be enforced with effective sanctions. However, when it comes to the need to protect core labour standards, human rights, cultural diversity and the integrity of the natural environment, the federal government wants to deal with such issues through institutions outside an FTAA that, by the government’s own admission, lack effective enforcement powers. We reject an approach to the FTAA that provides investors and corporations with ironclad protections for their commercial interests, but leaves citizens and their elected representatives with a referral to other organizations that are ill-equipped to serve their needs. If Canada is to sign a FTAA agreement, we believe that agreement must either deal with social, environmental, labour and human rights issues in an enforceable way, or other international or Pan-American agreements and institutions concerned with human rights, social, labour, and environmental issues must be given "teeth," i.e. – the power to sanction behaviour which violates agreed-upon standards. We urge the National Assembly to adopt a similar position.
In recent decades, Quebeckers have become very familiar with debates about sovereignty. These debates have been driven by serious and fundamental concerns, such as the right to self-determination, the need to balance individual and collective rights, and the significance of ethnicity and culture in the definition of a political community. While we acknowledge the significance of these debates, we find it both troubling and ironic that, at the very moment when the Quebec people has been discussing the most effective means of exercising its collective sovereignty, either within or outside Canadian federalism, that discussion has tended to ignore the dramatic erosion of both Quebecois and Canadian sovereignty that has been taking place through free trade agreements such as the CUSFTA and the NAFTA. We believe the Quebec people and its National Assembly have an interest in ensuring that such trade agreements do not render irrelevant or minimize the significance of Quebec’s sovereignty debates by further eroding the sovereignty of all peoples and their elected assemblies. We urge the National Assembly to seriously address this concern in developing its position on the proposed FTAA.
In closing, we want to emphasize the significance of the growing global backlash against the model of free trade that has been proposed for the FTAA. The successful popular campaign against the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the recent protests in Seattle, Washington and Windsor, and the massive mobilization planned for Quebec City during next year’s Summit of the Americas, have made it clear that we have passed an important turning point in the development of globalization. Before these pivotal events, the proponents of free trade agreements had successfully and disingenuously portrayed their critics as quaint throwbacks unable to come to terms with the inevitable forces of globalization. However, the debate surrounding the WTO meetings in Seattle showed that, in the post-MAI world, the debate about globalization involves two competing models of globalization: the prevailing model which is often aptly described as corporate globalization, and another emerging model that strives for a more appropriate balance between social and economic values.
To avoid debacles like the collapse of the Seattle WTO meetings, proponents of the former model must now take their critics’ arguments seriously. And if we critics are to continue being taken seriously, we must focus as much on articulating alternative approaches as we have on exposing the shortcomings of the current approach. In short, there is now an authentic debate about the future path of globalization, and the fundamental premise of that debate is that the future path of globalization is not predetermined by inevitable forces completely beyond our control. Rather, it will depend on the political choices we make as nations in the global community.
We urge the National Assembly to participate in that debate by joining us in the search an alternative approach to globalization by which the world might achieve a stable, rules-based global economy that protects the rights of workers and the environment, provides for cultural diversity and ensures the ability of governments to act in the public interest. The debate about the proposed FTAA offers an ideal opportunity to do just that.
