Response to the Throne Speech

February 1, 2001

Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg—Transcona, NDP):  “Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to comment on a few elements of the Speech from the Throne. I will not be able to cover everything but there are a few things that are of interest to me and to my party that I will speak to this afternoon.

The first thing of interest had to do with the mention in the throne speech of the government's initiative with respect to the free trade area of the Americas and the upcoming summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001.

The thing we found distressing, apart from our fundamental disagreement with the economic theory and paradigm represented by not just the free trade area of the Americas but by other free trade agreements, like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the WTO, was the total lack of understanding in the throne speech with respect to the concerns that so many Canadians have about the threat that these agreements pose to democracy. This was reinforced yesterday when my leader asked a question of the Prime Minister with respect to Quebec City and his answer was that he did not know there were any problems.

Surely there is a problem. The Prime Minister does not have to agree necessarily with all the people who are unhappy with the free trade area of the Americas and free trade agreements. He does not have to agree with everything that people who are intending to go to Quebec City to protest have to say, but he could at least acknowledge that they exist and that they have some legitimate concerns.

I recall, at the time of the meetings in Seattle, President Clinton, even though he was obviously unhappy about the protests, at least tipping his hat to the fact that he thought that people who were concerned about trying to integrate labour and environmental standards and a number of other things into these trade agreements had a point and a legitimate concern. However, we never get that kind of response from the Liberal government.

Yesterday we could see the potential for a replay of the APEC thing in Vancouver shaping up already. The Prime Minister making little of or showing no consideration for the situation that many people find themselves in when they are trying to make known their opposition to these agreements.

We remember the peppergate scandal and the comments the Prime Minister made in a very flippant way about what happened to some of the protesters in Vancouver. I do not recall him having anything to say about Seattle, but we know that as we speak they are building a wall around Quebec City. It might even be completed. They are also creating special jail cells in anticipation of multiple arrests of protesters who will be trying to make their voices heard.

I stand here today not in defence of violent protest but in defence of peaceful protest. What happened in Seattle and a number of other places is that peaceful protesters have been arrested and incarcerated for various lengths of time. It seems that this is the path that our own government is now on, and the Prime Minister is not even willing to acknowledge that there is a problem. I think that is very unfortunate.

It would have been much better for the Prime Minister to have said that he understood the many concerns about these free trade agreements. He could have then put his own position forward and given his reasons for thinking the concerns were unfounded or how the government intends to meet those concerns, but there has been no acknowledgement whatsoever.  I  find that to be a real absence of leadership on the part of the Prime Minister. One of the roles of leadership in the country is to acknowledge different opinions. One can take a side but one must also acknowledge the concerns of other people.

We are talking about a lot of young people who are very idealistic. They have been taught since they were knee high to a grasshopper that they live in a democracy, that the people who make decisions are the people who are elected by the people of the country.

They see more and more trade agreements being signed, and planned as is the case with the FTA, agreements which remove power from various elected national and subnational legislatures, whether they be parliaments, the national assembly in Quebec or the provincial legislatures. They see that more and more policy choices and options, which used to be available to elected persons, are no longer available. There are certain things we could do with respect to magazines, to drug patent legislation, to water exports and to environmental regulations that we cannot do any more. The list goes on and on of things that legislators once could do but which have now been struck down, not by some democratically elected world body but by a trade agreement and its enforcers.

Is it so wrong, is it something to be ridiculed that young people from one end of the country to the other are saying that they are worried. Should we mock them for being concerned about democracy? Should we not even acknowledge their concerns in a major political statement such as the throne speech? That is what the government did when it mentioned the FTAA twice, I believe. In neither paragraph did it even acknowledge that there were legitimate concerns that Canadians had about these agreements. This is from a party that made a political career prior to 1993 about expressing those very same concerns when it was in opposition and opposed to the FTA and sort of opposed to NAFTA.

By that time, we were starting to get the drift of where the Liberals really were at. Some of us, of course, knew even in 1988 that the majority of them, with the exception of their leader, Mr. Turner, were really on side with the ideology of the FTA.

We are very concerned about what we see here in the government. We see a wilful ignorance, I believe, with respect to the concerns that so many Canadians have about these agreements. An even more worrisome thing is the growing incidence of what I would call and what some others have called, the criminalization of dissent, particularly when that dissent is expressed on the streets in the form of peaceful protests.

This is something we ought to be very worried about if we want to continue to call ourselves a full and healthy democracy: that we are preparing to treat these international gatherings as some sort of gated political communities, political compounds in which things happen and happen only among those who have credentials. People who do not have the credentials and are not part of the special community are kept out. They cannot even be on the street outside the building. They have to be 10 miles away. They cannot even be seen. This is a very disturbing trend indeed.

It relates to other things that are being said these days about parliamentary reform. I find it odd that we can spend so much time talking about parliamentary reform. This is not to say that we will get parliamentary reform, but we have spent a lot of time talking about it, without addressing the fact that one of the things that has happened to parliament over the last several years, particularly since 1988, is that more and more of the power that parliament used to have has been abdicated and diverted.

I say to my friends on my right in the Canadian Alliance, as I have said at a conference that was sponsored in Edmonton last year or perhaps in the fall of 1999 with respect to the empowering of MPs, that often we hear about the problem of the courts deciding things that should be properly decided in parliament. I think that is a legitimate concern. It is a concern that I share to some degree, not entirely, but in some instances.

People who are concerned about parliamentary power being diverted to the courts should also be concerned about parliamentary power being diverted to the WTO or to the free trade agreements, which are reaching far deeper into the domestic policy making process than ever reached by the previous GATT or previously contemplated free trade agreements.

Free trade agreements of old had to do with the elimination of tariffs. These agreements have to do with investment policy, regulation of investment, energy, culture and natural resources. They have to do with all kinds of things that previous more traditional free trade agreements did not touch on.

We will learn to our great discomfort in the next few years, when some people find out as some of us knew all along, that we will not be able to have the kind of energy policy in Canada that we would like to have because we have signed away our power to have an energy policy in Canada to the free trade agreements.

As the prices of natural gas, oil and home heating fuel and everything else go up, people will ask why certain things cannot be done. The answer will be consistently that we cannot do that because that would be against the free trade agreement and we cannot do this because that would be against the free trade agreement.

In 1988 some of us said that it might look all right at the moment with respect to energy, but there will come a day when we will want to have a certain amount of power over our own resources with respect to pricing, export and even distribution, and we will not have that power because of the things that were written into the agreement. It is interesting that we should be in this position now.”

“ Going back to the free trade agreement of the Americas, we have indicated our intention to be in solidarity with those people who will be expressing their concerns about that agreement. In the past we have been the only party in the House of Commons to oppose the multilateral agreement on investment, which fortunately never happened, and to other free trade agreements which unfortunately did happen.

I heard my colleague from the Bloc saying that I was not quite right when I talked about the MAI, but at the risk of provoking a debate with members, I know one member of the Bloc has been concerned about globalization, to the point where he felt motivated to depart the Chamber with his chair.

It is a fact that these free trade agreements are in place in Canada because of the support they received in Quebec from sovereignists. Jacques Parizeau said over and over again, as recently as a week or so ago, that the free trade agreement was an instrument for Quebec sovereignty. He knew, in a way that Conservatives did not and Liberals used to but now willingly close their eyes, that the free trade agreement and the policy package that came with it in terms of privatization and deregulation has so weakened Canada that it makes it more vulnerable to the kind of plan that Mr. Parizeau has for Canada. That of course is its dismembering.

It may be that the sovereignist threat in Quebec is weak at this point for a variety of other reasons, but there is no question that the free trade agreements were seen by sovereignists and separatists as creating a context in which it would be easier for Quebec to separate. The east-west ties would be broken and more things would be north-south, and the argument for having to remain in Canada would be weaker.

I am glad to see that members of the Bloc are coming along on the issue. If they are concerned about sovereignty there is no point in arguing about the sovereignty of Quebec if at the same time they are uncritical about trade agreements that are reducing the sovereignty of all legislatures, whether they be national or subnational or subnational legislatures that would like to be national.

I welcome the evolution in the consciousness of members of the Bloc Quebecois. I hope at some point they might be full partners with us in opposition to these trade agreements, but they will never be full partners with us until they are attached to the country the way we are.”

Mr. John Bryden (Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot, Lib.): “Mr. Speaker, there are many of us on this side of the House who have great sympathy with the comment of the member for Winnipeg—Transcona when he said that the fuel rebate should not be tied to the GST.

I too am receiving many calls in my riding and it is a very divisive issue. The finance minister would do well to listen to the words of the member opposite and perhaps reconsider how that program is administered.

I would like to pose a question to the member opposite. He was referring to the problem of security at the upcoming summit in Quebec and how that sends a wrong message to young people who want to legitimately protest. All of us on this side agree that young people should protest. There are things to protest about the world trade agreements, and it is good that young people should be involved.

I well remember about a year and a half ago that there was a rally for the homeless just outside the House on the lawn in front of the Centre Block put on by the Coalition Against Poverty. The police were deployed in great numbers and cautioned us in the House to leave by a side door. We went out by a side door, but I was interested and I went and looked at the rally. There were hundreds of people there, mostly burly guys in boots. There were no homeless people there.

When the leader of the Conservative Party tried to walk into that crowd in order to speak to them, they swore at him and roughed him up. There was a similar protest with the Quebec Federation of Labour in which a hired protester tried to get through the security cordon of the Prime Minister.

Is it not true that this type of protest gangsterism spoils it for the young people who do want to legitimately protest? We have to put on security. Is it not true that the people who should really be condemned are groups like the Coalition Against Poverty?”

Mr. Bill Blaikie: “Mr. Speaker, I am not sure whether the hon. member is saying he thinks there are no burly homeless people or no homeless people with boots. I was not there that day and do not have a great deal of knowledge of the particular event. I was very careful in my remarks to talk about peaceful protests.

In Seattle, it was not just violent protesters who were locked up. The police decided they would clear whole areas of the city and make them uninhabitable for peaceful protesters as well as violent protesters. They locked a lot of people up. They seem to be planning to do the same in Quebec City. That is my concern.

There were 50,000 people marching in Seattle: environmentalists, trade unionists and food safety activists. The event was supervised by the steelworkers. There were no police visible. It was all done in a very civilized and peaceful way. That kind of thing will not be possible in Quebec City if a wall is built around it.

The Berlin Wall has come down, but walls are going up everywhere so that people who want to gather together to plot the weakening of democracy through further free trade agreements can meet without having to hear the voices of protesters.”