Free trade with Colombia. Who's next?

Last week, Canada and Colombia reached a deal on a free trade agreement. It may be introduced for ratification by Canada's Parliament as early as today.

Regular readers will know that I am a supporter of free trade in principle; provided that the aim is to raise living standards, not lower them and that national sovereignty in the whole is respected. However, another non-negotiable item is respect for human and labour rights. One certainly can't expect an all-encompassing regime such as exists in the European Union, but there should be a minimum level of respect for what's provided for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in a number of the protocols of the International Labour Organization.

Note the list of countries with which Canada presently have free trade agreements: Chile, Costa Rica, Israel, Peru, the EFTA states (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), Mexico and the United States. Of these, Costa Rica has a serious child prostitution problem the government won't deal with, Israel has a less than honourable record when it comes to the Palestinians, Peru is still locked in a civil war, and Mexico seems to have a convenient way of making Canadian tourists disappear -- and of course, you don't want to mess with a Federale. At the present time, we're in negotiations with Singapore which has one party regularly winning 80% of the seats thanks to gerrymandering and therefore cannot be considered a democracy in any sense of the term; and the country's press is free to criticize other countries' governments but not its own.

What is going on here?

I do believe countries which have proved they have improved their record should be entitled to escalating improvements in trade access, starting with debt relief, then Most Favoured Nation (the lowest level of tariff), then free trade. However, it is in our best interests to seek better access to markets on which we can rely on, countries which have proven they have good overall labour and human rights standards -- the EU, Australia, Japan. Wittingly supporting a still ongoing civil war and illicit drug trade is not my idea of lifting people up. The Colombian agreement does attempt to address human and labour rights but it does not go far enough. And let's not mention the environment.

The minority Parliament here should draw the line. We should not accept this as a fait accompli -- and ratification should be deferred until Colombia can prove they're moving forward and not going back into old habits.

Who's next on the free trade list? Zimbabwe? Sudan? Burma? You get my point.

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