Are there no workhouses?

Some holiday cheer from the Canadian neo-liberal think tank, Frontier Centre for Public Policy :

 Transcript :

"Labour laws in Canada are supposed to protect workers from exploitation and ensure their safety. But they are not always helping teenagers who are entering the workforce for the first time. Most provinces require that anyone younger than 16 or 14 obtain a permit to work or have written permission from their parents. Children under 12 are almost never allowed to work unless they might be helping on a family farm.  Teens who do work face many restrictions, including how many hours and which hours they're allowed to work. 

Some of these rules seem rather unnecessary. In Alberta, 12 to 14 year olds are forbidden from working more than 2 hours on a schoolday. Two hour workshifts four days a week are more disruptive than 4 hour shifts two days a week.
Minimum wage laws also make it more difficult for young people with no experience to find their first job. In the UK there's a lower minimum wage for people between the ages of 18 and 20 and for those under 18.  

Teenagers who live at home are often able to accept lower wages than adults.
It's time for governments to show more consideration for the needs of young people when developing labour policies."

Yes, why aren't more 12 year olds working four days a week for less than minimum wage?

I first got interested in FCPP back in 2007 when the Cons tapped them for policy advice on electoral reform. This was amusing because FCPP didn't seem very keen on electoral reform, although they were pretty big on private health care, denying the existence of climate change, disbanding the Canadian Wheat Board, and promoting bulk exports of water to the US.

Harper liked them well enough to give a guest speech at one of their fundraisers in Winnipeg in 2009 . This was the same year FCPP and the Fraser Institute co-sponsored the first Canadian tour of Lord Christopher "Global Warming is a Hoax" Monkton 

Currently on their main page they are featuring one of their research fellows, Wendell Cox,  also a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Heartland Institute, and author of The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy.

Our media seem pretty comfortable quoting and reprinting them. From just the past few days :

CBC : 'Greenpeace dropout' Patrick Moore defends Kinder Morgan pipeline

   Climate change denier and not founder of Greenpeace Patrick Moore is environment chair at FCPP

Financial Post : When emissions disappear, so do jobs

 by a senior FCPP research fellow

while Global News is running a half-hour weekly podcast on Alberta politics with the VP of FCPP 

Yet somehow I'm not seeing any big media interviews and guest spots with Michael Harris of Party of One or Donald Gutstein of Harperism  - two authors who have recently written about how think tanks repackage neo-liberal ideas for easy public consumption through a media chain.
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Happy Temporary Foreign Workers Labour Day!

Bloomberg, Dec 2010 : Europe’s largest oil-field service provider, Saipem, wins $1 Billion onshore contract from Husky for the Sunrise Energy Project in Canada.

Nine months ago, Fort McMurray Today reported that 270 unionized welders and pipefitters contracted to that Husky Sunrise tarsands project were laid off and replaced by cheaper temporary foreign workers from Mexico, Ireland, Portugal and Italy.

A commenter under another FMT article explained:

"We had to conduct a handover to Saipem (a mostly Italian workforce), detailing to them where we had stopped work so that they may continue. In the final week, Saipem foreign workers were actually in the facility working side by side with us; a very uncomfortable situation for those of us about to be laid off."

Yesterday, CBC's Kathy Tomlinson revisited that story : Canadians expose foreign worker 'mess' in oilsands"

"Canadian tradesmen from a huge oilsands construction project are waving a red flag about safety hazards and near misses, which they blame on the use of foreign workers who aren't qualified and can't speak English.

Stand-outs from her report :

• a foreign worker taking a blowtorch to a propane tank to defrost it, 
• Canadians with better qualifications passed over for jobs while foreign workers from Europe continued to show up 
• foreigner workers arrived without Canadian-standard trade certification but "under government rules, they have a year before they must take their test." after which they can take it again later if they fail,  and 
• "Probably 75 per cent of [foreign] ironworkers on site were only at the level of a labourer."
• When refused LMAOs, Saipem used "intra-company transfers" instead [which I wrote about here.] 

But back up a bit. The company that brought in those workers - Italian oil and gas services contractor, Saipem.  Haven't we heard about them before?

Dec. 2012 : Saipem CEO resigns after Algeria corruption probe

July 2013 :Milan court rules Saipem guilty of corruption in Nigeria ... 

July 2013 : Saipem drilling rig sinks off Angola One person missing

"The Italian oilfield services provider said that one of the jack-up rig’s three legs collapsed, causing the rig to suddenly tilt and start taking water. The incident, according to Saipem, occurred during the rig positioning on location between the coasts of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in approximately 40 meters of water. 6 crew members have sustained minor injuries. At approximately 10:30 am CET, the rig, with no personnel on board, capsized and sank. "

Sept. 2013 : Milan prosecutors investigate Saipem for alleged market manipulation and insider trading

May 2014 : RBC Investor and Treasury Services - SAIPEM  - Class Action Notice 

"As a result of the company's untimely disclosures of relevant information, particularly its involvement in an Algerian corruption scandal from 2007 to 2010, and it is alleged that Saipem paid bribes to win a series of contracts worth around $11 billion which led to significant stock drops in January and June 2013. Various (criminal) investigations against Saipem by the Consob, the Italian market regulator, and Italian prosecutors are ongoing."

July 2014 : Australian unions fury at Coalition`s gas job sell-out

"Saipem's enormous pipelay vessel Castorone will start work soon off the Australia coast.  The Government issued a regulation eliminating the need for any worker on a craft not tethered to the Australian mainland to have a work visa. That would free foreign companies with the contracts to lay pipework and other vital infrastructure on huge projects such as the Browse Basin gas field to hire thousands of foreign workers instead of Australians."

Gosh, just like here.
But no, not any of those stories ... 
Ah I remember - it was Arthur Porter, SNC-Lavalin, and Saipem!

In 2005, Saipem won a contract with SNC-Lavalin for the Horizon oilsands project, owned by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
In 2006, SNC-Lavalin and Saipem awarded "joint partnership contract" to build LNG Terminal in New Brunswick.

Four years later, SNC-Lavalin had signed a deal to award soon-to-be CSIS watchdog Dr. Arthur Porter of Sierra Leone (currently on the lam from Canadian law in Panama) and his company Sierra Assets Management, 3 payments totaling $10-million for consultancy fees regarding a gas project in Algeria.  The $1.2 billion Rhourde Nouss gas project deal was awarded to SNC-L the same year by Sonatrach, Algeria’s national oil company.

In 2013,  Algerian police raided SNC offices in Algiers regarding "allegations of bribery and kickbacks involving Sonatrach and public officials and agents hired by SNC-Lavalin to procure a number of large infrastructure projects."

G&M February 2013 : SNC-Lavalin bribery probe widens to Algeria :

The investigation focuses on one of the company’s agents in Algeria, Farid Bedjaoui, a jet-setting money manager hired to help secure at least $1-billion in contracts with the country’s state-run oil company, Sonatrach. Mr. Bedjaoui was educated in Montreal and occasionally resides there

Sources close to the investigations in Europe and Canada believe that SNC and the Italian oil services firm Saipem SpA relied on Mr. Bedjaoui, the nephew of former Algerian foreign affairs minister Mohammed Bedjaoui, to obtain contracts from Sonatrach.

Mr. Bedjaoui is one of several foreign agents hired by SNC who have fallen under suspicion for allegedly paying bribes.

Several Saipem executives are under investigation, including the construction unit’s recently suspended chief operating officer, Pietro Varone, who was so close with Mr. Bedjaoui that the two men launched a wine-making company together outside Naples.

Well, I'm sure when we sign off on those investor-state rights trade deals with Europe, CETA and TTIP, all this will go much more smoothly, right?

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Harper's LMFAO Program

CBC : "Effective Dec.31, 2013, the government will no longer approve labour market opinion applications from employers looking to hire foreign workers in the sex trade industry, a spokesperson for the department of Employment and Social Development Canada told CBC News. An LMO is usually required to prove the need to hire a temporary foreign worker over a Canadian one."

Usually. Usually you need an LMO to prove there's no Canadian looking for the same work. Unless of course you're an Alberta employer looking to hire some temporary foreign workers as steam-fitters, pipe-fitters, carpenters, estimators, heavy-duty equipment mechanics, ironworkers, millwrights, industrial mechanics, or welders. Then you can just hire them at a job fair in Ireland to work alongside the Canadian workers you're going to lay off once the TFWs are trained up to take over. And no LMO!
The Canada-Alberta pilot program which added more eligible occupations to the TFW Annex runs to July 2016.

And about that "skills shortage" excuse used to justify importing TFWs.
TD Economics : 

"The notion of a severe labour market skills mismatch has topped the headlines. With data in hand, we debunk the notion that Canada is facing an imminent skills crisis."

Meanwhile ...

G&M : "Employers convicted of human trafficking, sexually assaulting an employee or causing the death of an employee will be allowed to access the Temporary Foreign Worker program after Ottawa decided to back away from a proposed ban."

Culling employers guilty of human trafficking, sexual assault, or death was deemed "too rigid and cumbersome, the government states."

So. Temporary foreign sex workers are banned because they are deemed especially "vulnerable to abuse", but employers convicted of sexual assault and human trafficking can go ahead and hire TFWs for any other work.

LMFAO!

h/t Montreal Simon : The Cons and the Great Foreign Workers Scam.
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Sunday Update : US State Dept 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report - Canada, excerpted :

"Labor trafficking victims include foreign workers from Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa who enter Canada legally—sometimes through the temporary foreign worker program—but then are subsequently subjected to forced labor in agriculture, construction, processing plants, restaurants, the hospitality sector, or as domestic servants. Reports of forced labor continue to be more prevalent in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. 

As of February 2013, there were at least 77 ongoing federal human trafficking prosecutions ... These cases involved at least 130 defendants and 119 victims.   

During the year, the wife and step-daughter of a Hungarian forced labor victim who testified against his traffickers were deported after their refugee request was denied."

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Made in the USA : Tim Hudak

Teahadist Tim Hudak, former Walmart manager and leader of the Ontario PC Con Party since 2009, doesn't much care for the term "right-to-work" laws, preferring instead "worker's choice reforms".  
Well, OK then - Workers' choice of the right to work for less money, reducing wages for union and non-union workers alike and pitting worker against worker.

On Friday, LauraK went to hear Chris Hedges in Toronto and provides an excellent overview of his talk on Syria, Chelsea Manning, the surveillance state, corporate and media ownership, the liberal class, and organized labour.
Laura's piece really worth a full read but here excerpted : Hedges :

"It's amazing. We do everything wrong in the United States, and 10 years later, Canada copies us.    Do you have 'right-to-work' laws here yet?" The audience answered that we do not.  And Hedges replied: "The minute Harper passes those laws, if you guys don't have a massive general strike, you're finished." He said, "You still have enough organized labour in Canada to mount a resistance."

Trapped in a Whirlpool : The Power of Irrationality 

And a reminder of Steve's 2011 bid for a Harper Hudak Ford "hat trick" :

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Dr. Kellie Leitch, Minister of Labour

A look at what we can expect from our new Minister of Labour.

So how many of you made it all the way through to Leitch at the Harper/Hudak/Ford TeaCon Trifecta BBQ?
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Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2

Shorter Gord Nixon : Look, they're not your jobs, they're our jobs, and if we choose to move our jobs offshore to another company without you because it's cheaper, that's just business. Besides, only one of the 13 dudes we brought in to RBC came under iGATE's temporary foreign worker application - the rest of them are house guests.

About that one iGATE dude : G&M : 

The federal government is investigating Royal Bank of Canada’s move to outsource technology jobs and reviewing paperwork submitted by its contractor to bring in temporary foreign workers. The probe centres on what the government sees as “apparent discrepancies” regarding RBC’s explanation of the events.
RBC came under fire on the weekend after allegations emerged that Canada’s largest bank contracted iGate Corp. to handle the outsourcing of certain technology jobs, and the firm was using temporary foreign workers to displace RBC technology staff. The bank denied those claims, and said it does not get involved in the hiring practices of the companies it hires. 

“An investigation is under way and Human Resources and Skills Development Canada officials are currently reviewing the labour market opinions submitted by iGate in great detail, based on apparent discrepancies between RBC’s public statement and information which has previously been provided to the government,” said Alyson Queen, a spokeswoman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley. 

Meanwhile when CBC interviewed Diane Finley's parlsec Kellie Leitch about the bankster issue, Leitch went on and on and on about "very critical labour shortages in Canada". Way to entirely miss the effing point, Kellie. These people had jobs.

But it's not just RBC of course. Two minutes of statements from employees replaced by foreign workers at TD Canada Trust, Scotiabank, and RBC :



Yesterday CBC Go Public reporter Kathy Tomlinson, who broke the RBC offshoring in-and outsourcing jobs story, was on CBC BC Early Edition. She said she also heard the same stories from terminated employees at Bank of Montreal and CIBC. Excerpted transcript :

I'm getting emails from people who are management, that are high in this and who know how it works. It seems to me that the banks essentially have a template and these outsourcing companies have a template too - they know exactly how to present their case for bringing these workers in, and remember it's the outsourcing company that actually brings the workers in. They're the one that apply to the government for permission and they're the ones that get these workers the visas., right? 

But of course the banks are involved - they're a partnership. So it looks to me from what I'm hearing that there's a template that they've developed that's approved by the government." 

Anna Maria Tremonti's show today took on the larger issue of global outsourcing: 

The insourced foreign workers go home to do the work from their own countries where they are paid 50% of what the Canadians they replaced made.

We have had foreign temporary workers for over 40 years but since 2006 there's been an explosion of low skill temporary foreign workers who can stay here for up to four years and be paid 15% less. Not just low skill workers, this has now evolved to include engineers.

Armine Yalnizyan from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives : 

" Importing people to learn the skills so they can take the skills out - what kind of public policy is that? The Economic McAction Plan."

Alberta Federation of Labour, today, on guest worker permits provided by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada :

Between April 25 and December 18, 2012, more than 2,400 Accelerated Labour Market Opinion or ALMO guest-worker permits – which are supposed to be reserved for highly-skilled employment – have been granted to fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations. McDonalds, Tim Hortons, A&W, Subway Sandwiches. Are we supposed to believe that these are ‘high-skill’ employment opportunities? 

More than 54 per cent (2,640) of the ALMO approvals in the country were for Alberta-based employers.  ...  The list of businesses in Alberta who received ALMO approvals included 33 A&W restaurants. 

The ALMO stream, introduced in last year’s omnibus budget bill, is proving to be the latest evidence that the temporary foreign worker program is part of a low-wage agenda on the part of radical Tea-Party Tories.

How are young people supposed to compete for temporary low skill jobs to get the education they need in order to finally not be able to get the IT jobs they trained for because they've all gone offshore? Because the real news here is that good education and a relevant skill level is no longer enough to keep you off the unemployment line. 

Armine Yalnizan is right - this is terrible public policy on the government's part.

And finally, the Cons fundraiser/voter contact company, Xentel/RMG/iMarketing Solutions Group, announced yesterday that it is laying off its call centre workers. (h/t Holly Stick)

Will they be outsourcing those jobs offshore? I ask because the Conservative Party of Canada is currently trolling Creekside reading all the posts on Royal Bank and iMarketing Solutions/RMG.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada, Part 1

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3             Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada

Royal Bank of Canada Chief Human Resources Officer Zabeen Hirji explains here that technically it's not RBC that has hired temporary foreign workers to replace RBC employees. No, rather it's that RBC has hired Indian offshore outsourcing company iGATE to do their own hiring as part of RBC's plan to transition RBC IT jobs overseas to India. 

What about government reaction that this is unacceptable?
Oh, says Hirji, we were already in conversation with relevant government departments last week and besides everybody is outsourcing overseas now.

Indeed.

At left we see iGATE receiving RBC's Outsourcing Excellence Award back in 2008 when RBC only had 500 iGATE employees working for them. 

A few months later, RBC itself received a $25 billion dollar government bailout, or 'backstop' as we prefer to call taxpayer bailouts of corps in Canada, amounting to 63% of the bank's total value. RBC CEO Gordon Nixon took home $10M+ in salary and compensation that same year.

At the time, RBC VP and head of Application Services Marjorie Mong explained :

"The key message to [RBC IT staff] was that offshoring was not about job cuts. It was about augmenting our workforce in a flexible way."

While Canadians were surprised and outraged over the weekend at news of RBC's parasitic behavior, Rochester Institute of Technology public policy professor Ron Hira has spent the last decade studying how "offshore-outsourcing consulting firms" work in the States. 

... consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas.

"What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B [foreign temporary tech workers] program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore."

As RBC's Hirji explained above, it was necessary to bring the offshore workers on-site to RBC in order to learn RBC procedures first hand.

The two companies have been working closely since 2005. There is an "RBC Offshore Development Centre" in the iGATE facility in Bangalore. 

RBC spokesperson Rina Cortese told Go Public several foreign workers from iGATE will be working in the bank’s Toronto offices until 2015. By then, she said, most of the work will be transferred abroad, but a few of the foreigners will remain indefinitely.

[RBC] workers said they were not offered jobs with iGATE and were told this "realignment" might expand to affect more of the bank’s 57,500 employees in Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister and presumed PM-in-waiting Jason Kenney managed to express surprise that the temporary foreign worker program under his purview he has long touted as absolutely vital to Canadian interests would be so abused.

Boycott Royal Bank of Canada as first suggested by blogger Norm Farrell.   Do it.

Yes, that means your Visa card too. Outsource your money to a credit union in your own community instead.

Has anyone called this iGATE-gate yet? Allow me to be the first.

Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2           Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3

Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang
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The Canada-Jordan FTA - a licence for human trafficking

On Monday the International Trade Committee heard devastating evidence from two witnesses warning that the Canada-Jordan Free Trade Act will merely provide cover for human trafficking and primarily benefit only China and large multinationals like Walmart and Kmart.

Tim Waters, Political Director of United Steelworkers :

"The U.S.-Jordan trade deal immediately descended into the trafficking of tens of thousands of foreign workers to Jordanian factories."

Waters said he had been a champion of passing the US-Jordan FTA in the mistaken belief that it would benefit both US and Jordanian workers and level the international playing field on tarriffs. Instead, on visiting Jordan, he found almost no Jordanians working in the factories there; over 90%, some 30,000+ workers, are all imported.

Factory owners from India, Sri Lanka, and China imprison 'guest' workers from Bangladesh, China, India, Nepal, and the Philippines in compounds in Jordan where they are worked from 12 to 18 hours a day seven days a week in appalling conditions under constant threat of rape, beatings, and deportation.

Locked up after having their passports confiscated at the airport, these indentured labourers have no recourse to the law - despite Lib Scott Brison, FTA pointman for the Cons once again, echoed by Lib Martha Hall Findlay once again, laughably touting the FTA in the House as ensuring :

"following the precedent set by the U.S.-Jordan FTA ... the right to freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, the abolition of child labour, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, and the elimination of discrimination."

Moreover, said Waters, although human rights provisions embedded in the core of the US bill were ignored in Jordan despite the US wielding the big stick of foreign aid, the similar but weaker Canadian safeguards stand to be even less enforceable as they are only part of a side agreement to Bill C-8.

Gosh, another dubious LibroCon labour rights side agreement - just like Brison's previous precious - the Canada-Colombia FTA.

Waters begged the committee members not to make the same mistake in trusting foreign corporations based in Jordan to police their own human and labour rights standards, a decision his union "deeply regrets". It simply does not work, he said.

Charles Kernaghan, U.S. National Labor Committee executive director :

"When the workers signed their three-year contract to go to Jordan, they were told they'd get free food, free health care, free housing --all of it decent. That is not true.

We've seen that with a Canadian apparel company, the Nygard company. It was producing at a factory called International British Garments. In April, when we investigated that factory, 1,200 workers had been stripped of their passports. They were working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night: 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. For the 110 hours of time they were at the factory, they were paid less than half of the minimum wage. They faced sexual harassment, filthy dormitories, and bedbugs."

On top of all that they are charged for their food and have no access to medical attention.

The response to this testimony was about what we've come to expect from this committee.
Liberal MP and moral idiot John Cannis :

"What you're saying is that it's okay if the rest of the world goes and puts on paper firm guidelines and agrees to the wording, and it's firm and it's strong and so on, and says, “Canada, you continue being the boy scout, and we'll continue doing business”.

Waters :

"With all due respect, I don't think that argument holds, simply because you can't say that since everybody else is wrong and everybody else is doing it, then we should too. Had we [United Steelworkers] known what was going to happen, we never would have supported this, okay? We supported it only because we took the deal at face value."

He went on to say that aside from the garment-producing multinationals, the other beneficiary of slave labour in Jordan is China - where the fabric is imported from.

"The U.S.-Jordan free trade agreement actually benefited China more than anyone else: we estimate about $100 million a year in tariff breaks for their textiles to enter the United States. ... By contrast, benefits to US workers were negligible."

Con Gerald Keddy pretends to miss the point that the US-Jordan FTA labour regs are being entirely ignored along with Jordan's own labour laws, and goes with the "mistakes were made" defence :

"You can't come to us and tell us we have to change the rules. Under our agreement on labour cooperation, we have put some very strict guidelines in this agreement. This does not apply simply to Jordanian workers; it also applies to migrant workers and migrant labour. It is under the International Labour Organization's international guidelines and, quite frankly, it recognizes that some of the migrant worker regulatory regime in Jordan has been less than perfect, that there have been some abuses and some mistakes made ...

In our agreement we also have the ability to facilitate the dissemination of information--specifically labour information--to guest workers and migrant workers so that they actually do understand their rights."

Yeah, Keddy, that's the ticket. A pamphlet drop.

Kernaghan responds to Keddy :

"We asked the Jordanian government to allow NGOs in from the countries where the workers are from, from Bangladesh and from Sri Lanka--and that would be the single biggest element--so that the workers would have advocates. They flat out refused."

Con Ed Holder waxes interminably about all the wonderful benefits that will accrue for Canada, despite total trade in merchandise between Canada and Jordan standing at a measly $82 million.

Waters:

"The benefit was for the garment producers in Jordan to have duty-free access into the U.S. market. 86% of the exports from Jordan to the United States are garments. They're at the table here because they want the same duty-free access to the Canadian marketplace that they have to the U.S. marketplace."

Bill C-8, the Canada-Jordan FTA, passed second reading in the House on Sept 27 and is well on its way to being blessed into law by the ConservaLiberal coalition. The International Trade Committee consists of 6 Cons, 3 Libs, 2 Bloc, and 1 NDP, with all 3 Libs having pledged to support it.

Irony Alert : Yesterday Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced proposed legislation to crack down on human trafficking in Canada.

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Libs and Cons - fighting evil together

The June 2008 Committee on International Trade passed a motion that the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement should not be ratified until an independent human rights impact assessment could be carried out first.
Luckily, former Con MP Scott Brison, now the Liberal trade critic, has found a way around that.
In a deal he hammered out with Colombian President Uribe at Davros in January, Canada and Colombia will each do their own yearly human rights assessments instead.

What's not to like? say the Libs.

Sure, our annual trade with Colombia is smaller than that with Rhode Island and 80% of Colombia’s imports to Canada are duty free already, but let's not forget what's really at stake here :

Scott Brison, in the House on Monday, Sept 14, 2009 :

"If we isolate Colombia in the Andean region and leave Colombia exposed and vulnerable to the ideological attacks of Chavez's Venezuela, we will be allowing evil to flourish."

In a happy coincidence for the Libs and Cons, fighting evil in Colombia includes the handy bonus of providing cover for Canadian corporations to promote exploitation in a country that killed 45 trade unionists in 2009. and will be used to ease passage of the US-Colombia FTA, currently held up in Congress due to concerns about unchecked and increasing human rights abuses.

Saturday morning media-bash update : I see CBC's The House, the G&M, CP, etc are all touting the deal this morning as cats and dogs getting along nicely hey ho parliament does work after all let's see more of this etc. etc.
No, this is just a bipartisan attempt to get around the Trade Committee's motion to have an independent human rights assessment as a precondition to passing the bill. No one has ever doubted that the Canadian and Colombian governments could come up with their own human rights report cards to justify this deal after the fact.
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Canada's first-ever corporate social responsibility counsellor

Today is the first day on the job for Canada's first-ever corporate social responsibility counsellor.
Marketa Evans, founding director of the University of Toronto's Munk Centre on International Studies, will help Canadian mining and energy companies in countries like Colombia improve their social and environmental standards.

The Munk Centre is named after Peter Munk, chairman and founder of the world's largest gold-mining company Barrick Gold, who contributed $6.4 million to its construction.

.... a post-doctoral fellow was stopped from organizing a panel on mining issues at the Munk Centre that would include discussions of Barrick Gold's operations.

Corporate social responsibility counsellor Evans will report directly to Trade Minister Stockwell Day, does not have the power to mediate disputes, and is not allowed to investigate cases without first obtaining agreement from all parties involved.

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Oh, well done.

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The CSR counsellor's mandate was much discussed during debates on the Canada-Colombia FTA, with the Bloc and NDP noting a certain lack of toothiness.

Just before the Thanksgiving break, the Libs supported a Con motion to prevent any further amendments to the Colombia agreement, so as the House resumes sitting today, the NDP and Bloc insistance on further debate is the only thing preventing this appalling piece of legislation from reaching second reading.

Lib MP Scott Brison, Sept. 14 :

"If we isolate Colombia in the Andean region and leave Colombia exposed and vulnerable to the ideological attacks of Chavez's Venezuela, we will be allowing evil to flourish."

Brison, who is on the trade committee, and Bob Rae say they just want to see the bill go back to committee where - hello! the membership consists of 6 Cons, 3 Libs, 2 Bloc, and 1 NDP - or odds in favour of it passing - 9 to 3.

Meanwhile, irony-deficient Government House Leader Jay Hill, master of the Cons' 2007 dirty tricks manual on "how to unleash chaos while chairing parliamentary committees", is complaining that NDP opposition to the bill "is making Parliament dysfunctional".
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The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement - A licence to kill

I'm trying to imagine how well it would go down in Canada if we passed a law providing for a token fine to be paid - on a purely voluntary basis -whenever the government combined with Canadian corporations to murder union workers. Not too well I think.

So why are we again considering promoting this behavior from the over 20 Canadian mining and oil and gas operations already in Columbia, including Nexen, Enbridge, Petrominerales, Coalcorp and Vancouver's B2Gold?


In July 2007 Steve stood next to President Uribe of Colombia and proclaimed it would be "ridiculous" to refuse to enter a free trade agreement with Columbia based on the latter's abysmal human rights record - a record which is even worse in 2008 than it was in 2007.

In November 2008 Steve and Uribe shook hands on the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Coincidentally this was the same month the world heard about high-ranking Colombian army officers involved in “false positives” - the execution and dressing up of civilians as FARC guerrillas and claiming they were killed in combat in order to collect a body count bonus.

On March 26, 2009, the Canada-Columbia Free Trade Agreement passed first reading in the House as Bill C-23.



Some notes from the excellent MAKING A BAD SITUATION WORSE -
AN ANALYSIS OF THE TEXT OF THE CANADA-COLOMBIA FREE TRADE AGREEMENT

Canadian Council for International Co-operation
Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers
Canadian Labour Congress
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

• Extrajudicial executions by security forces : 2007 - 330; 2004 to 2006 - 220; 2003 - 130 ; 2002 - 100.


• 270,675 people have been forced to flee from their homes in the first quarter of 2008 - the highest rate of internal displacement since 1987


• 1,015 people have disappeared over the past year – more than four times the total for 2007 and a 1300% increase over 2005. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, members of the country’s armed forces are suspects in more than 90% of the cases it is investigating.


• Fewer than 1% of Colombian workers enjoy the right to collective bargaining, hampered by the introduction of anti-union legislation
• Over 60% of the more than 3 million internally displaced people in Colombia have been forced from their homes and lands in areas of mineral, agricultural or other economic importance.
• As of October 2008, more than 60 parliamentarians – most of whom are part of President Uribe's governing coalition in Congress… were under formal or preliminary investigation for their suspected links to paramilitary groups..., several have either pleaded guilty or have been found guilty of association with paramilitary groups, electoral fraud, murder, and the organizing, arming and financing of paramilitary groups.”

In Feb. 2008, Daniel García-Peña, VP of the leftist opposition party in Colombia came to Canada and explained why a free trade agreement would be "very negative for Canada and Colombia." :

"Canadian companies would be attracted to Colombia for all the wrong reasons, namely to take advantage of the country's weak labour, human rights and environmental laws. Many companies will come to bypass the laws Canada has and take advantage of Colombian standards, which are much lower. In many ways [this could] promote the exploitation of workers."
Furthermore, Mr. García-Peña says, a trade deal could destroy the livelihoods of many small Colombian farmers by flooding the market with subsidized agricultural imports. "The small peasant farmer would be unable to compete with the cheap imports of food," he says. "[This] would wipe them out."
Those who would benefit, he says, are the large agro-businesses in Colombia that would buy up the land of destitute farmers for the production of biodiesel, palm oil and beef for export.
Worst of all, Mr. García-Peña adds, these large agro-businesses have ties to the paramilitary squads at the heart of the ongoing rights abuses and violence in the South American country."

Please join NDP MP Peter Julian in sending Michael Ignatieff a note asking him to do some credit to his former reputation as a human rights activist : IgnatM@parl.gc.ca
Top Ten Reasons Why Canada Should Cancel Harper's "Free Trade" Deal With Colombia.
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