Liberal trade critic Martha Hall Findlay (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
Yesterday afternoon Council of Canadians water campaigner Emma Lui and I went to meet with Montreal-area Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia on what we thought was to be a discussion on a range of water issues, including Schedule 2 (Scarpaleggia has a private members bill on this issue) and C-26, the government’s so-called bill to ban bulk water exports. We were curious why Liberal MP and party trade critic Martha Hall Findlay would also be at the meeting when we were told she would be attending. And more so when we arrived at Scarpaleggia’s Parliament Hill office and Guelph Liberal MP Frank Valeriote was there too.
The meeting turned out to be entirely about the water-related implications of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and revealed some of the divisions within the Liberal party on this issue. While Scarpaleggia expressed concern about drinking water being included in the services chapter of CETA and Valeriote highlighted the local preferences option that would be lost with a procurement chapter, Hall Findlay dominated the questioning and began with the statement, ‘the Liberal party is a party of free trade’.
Overall:
1- although she had claimed to have read the CETA and water report we wrote with CUPE, she kept asking the basic question about whether we thought water services should be publicly owned or just owned by Canadian companies versus European companies;
2- when we raised concerns about investor-state provisions, she did not share our critique of NAFTA Chapter 11, argued about its implications, and would then be dismissive by saying nothing has been finalized yet in CETA;
3- when we noted growing opposition within the European Parliament to CETA and in particular concerns about the tar sands, she stated that a delegation of MEPs had thought that the tar sands were terrible until they saw them first hand this past fall and they completely changed their minds;
4- she was non-committal on the Harper government pushing acceptance of GMOs on Europe during the negotiations, but seemed to infer support for increasing Canada’s GMO agricultural exports to Europe;
5- the only area where the opposition trade critic seemed to differ at all from the government position was on the visa restrictions placed on Czech citizens, but even there she stated there had been a spike in Roma refugees and likened it to having to deal with Mexican migrants.
At one point too when we began to list the growing areas of concern in Europe about CETA, she turned to Valeriote and dismissively said all of these points were covered in her briefing book.
The position taken by Hall Findlay perhaps should not be surprising (it’s in the tradition of a former Liberal trade critic Scott Brison who helped push through the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement), but it is problematic in that in the current Parliament the 77 Liberal MPs and the 143 Conservatives MPs provide enough votes to pass CETA when it finally does come to the 308-seat House of Commons. That said, given the amount of election speculation, it is very likely that CETA will not go to the House before a general election. That points to our need to make CETA an election issue and effectively pressure the Liberals to take a better position than they have apparently taken at this point.
Photo: Liberal trade critic Martha Hall Findlay, http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2010/08/orders-of-the-day—let-the-battle-of-the-eastwest-coast-partisan-barbecue-circuits-begin.html
