Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Issue No. 16 - Evidence - Meeting of February 1, 2017
OTTAWA, Wednesday, February 1, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade met this day at 4:17 p.m. for the consideration of a draft agenda (future business).
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: This will be a bit of unusual meeting because we have had a moving target on some of our items. What I propose to do today is I have one item with pleasure at the start, and then I'm going to provide information about what the steering committee has done on each and every one of the topics that we have ongoing so that you are brought up to date.
It has not been normal in this committee, nor in others, for debriefings from the steering committee because we move on the issues. You have delegated to the steering committee, by virtue of our rules, the conduct of the meeting, but I thought it would be appropriate, with new members and with the way some of the issues have gone, that you all get all of the background. It's probably more than you need to know, but I think it might be helpful.
I'm then going to suggest that we go in camera for an informal meeting where we can talk about how we are on issues and how this committee works, for the new members, should you wish. It's not mandatory, but I'm offering that to you.
Our staff will stay with us. It should not be a long meeting, so that's the good news for all of you. Tomorrow we'll resume our normal process.
Tomorrow we expect to deal with Bill S-219, which is the Iran bill of Senator Tkachuk, and clause by clause for Bill S-226, the Magnitsky bill. That will be tomorrow's order.
Today, if you read our rules, you will see they refer to usual consultations for adding members to the steering committee, and then it is the prerogative of the chair to announce that the usual consultations have taken place. I'm very pleased to say that Senator Saint-Germain has been put forward. Everyone is in enthusiastic agreement. Therefore, I will confirm that Senator Saint-Germain will join us on the steering committee from the new independent group, non-voting, but as I have assured her, we are very free with advice and opinions, and we won't make any of those distinctions.
We have not to this date ever gone to a vote on our committee, and I hope we can keep it that way. We work collegially.
Welcome to the steering committee, and thank you for so kindly accepting.
I should say that Senator Saint-Germain, I think, knew about the fact that she might be coming on the steering committee because she took the trade report and read it all and was the first one back commenting on it and making recommendations. I'll talk about those later. She's already done her due diligence as a steering committee member.
Again, I welcome all the new senators. As I said, we can have an informal discussion in this committee of where we go and how we work and any suggestions and questions you may have. Hopefully this is the first of the dialogue.
Now that I have the first item out of the way, I'm going to go to a steering committee meeting that we held recently. Everything I say here can go on the record because there are actions taken. I'm going to go to some of the easier items first.
We have two outstanding reports. One was the trade report, trade promotion. We have a name for it now. You gave us the authority to proceed with the trade report subject to editing, and we did that with the hope we could do it in January because that was the recommendation from the Communications Directorate. We had finally finalized and we had the recommendations. But two things intervened: It was not a good time to have the report; and secondly, unfortunately due to medical treatments that I had, I was not available at the times that they scheduled.
So that gave an opportunity. We recirculated the report and I asked for comments. Senator Saint-Germain made a comment, and I don't believe I received any other comments. Then we recirculated it to steering with Pascal's changes.
There were three sets of changes. One was the Trump issue on TPP. The report had been written as if TPP was contemplated. With Trump saying "no,'' we don't know what is happening. It could proceed in some other form; it could still proceed with the U.S. or it may not at all. So we tried to put in a bit of a disclaimer about the facts overtaking it, otherwise it would be a dated report. Pascal did a great job of putting that in.
The second thing is he had to do a revision of saying that the TPP will/is/would/could have. He's done the cleanup of the report so that it reflects today's reality.
Senator Saint-Germain made a valid point that all of our recommendations about consultations and how we approach trade agreements should also be incorporated into renegotiations of trade agreements. I had one comment that at that time, when the letter came in, we didn't want to be seen to be taking sides on neither NAFTA nor TPP. That isn't our job. It was not the focus of the trade report. It was more a generic approach to what was wrong with what we have been doing, how we could improve it and recommendations.
We came to a good agreement, and Pascal was able to put it in the terms that in any future negotiations this is how it should be approached without talking about reopening or renegotiations.
Marie-Eve Belzile, Clerk of the Committee: I will remind you that we are not in camera.
The Chair: That's fine.
Pascal Tremblay, Analyst, Library of Parliament: I think it's a good summary.
The Chair: Basically, the report we have been dealing with, the recommendations that you saw, those are the ones we are going to work on.
It's more the content and the setting that we are talking about, and that will be what we will talk about with the press. Our report was really studied before any actions were taken by any of our partners, including the U.S., and we have taken them into account to make our report current.
The report has gone to translation and come out. Yesterday, the steering committee approved Pascal's changes. I think the report should be circulated now to all of the members. You will get the report with the amendments so that you know what is happening.
The steering committee agreed to present the report next Tuesday. Staff tell us that they can meet those time frames. Unless something goes off the rails, it should be in the morning — filed with the Senate at 8:30 and a press conference at 9:30. We welcome all members to go. You'll get further details about that. The press conference will be with Senator Downe, Senator Ngo and myself. Senator Saint-Germain will be there as well. Steering committees are normally obliged to be there. Others are welcome to come if you can. We are hopeful to get a response.
We will do editorial pieces. One thing I am hoping is a round table with some of the key actors in this to talk about our report. Maybe we can have that televised as one of our meetings.
Please read the report and be current on the copy you will receive later today or tomorrow by email.
That is the status of the trade report. I don't know if there are any questions. If not, I will move to the Argentinian report.
The Argentinian report was drafted by Natalie. It was an excellent report. Natalie has been with us a long time and tends to want to incorporate every person's point of view and what they want most in the report. But how do you structure it all together? She did run it by me. Due to my medical delays, we finally got together by conference call and spent some time on the phone, went through the report and restructured it a bit. She did a phenomenal job of getting it done. It is a classic piece, if you want to read about Argentina, because it has a lot of history and a lot of input on trade, politics, human rights, et cetera. I think it's an excellent piece, with recommendations.
Our report was written earlier. One proviso we had in there is that a lot of what is good in the direction the government wants to go is dependent on the governance of that. So we have done some adjusting on that. I don't need to talk about it today. You'll get the report as soon as it comes out of translation. In the meantime, the steering committee is dealing with it and you will get it. We're hoping that it will be late February, early March for filing of that report. Stay tuned. Anything you can contribute to it, please do so when we send it to you. All remarks, comments and changes would be welcome.
We're just in the preliminary stages. I think it's an excellent report covering much of what Argentina is and could be, and Canada's role and recommendations that I think could flow from it. So that is the Argentine report.
I'm going to go to two other pieces of government legislation. CETA is what we're imminently expecting. We are getting comments from the other side. We don't control the house and we don't control the government. But we have been receiving formally and informally that the expectation is that the house would move quickly on it and that we would perhaps receive it to match when the European Parliament would be voting for it.
The European Parliament has already by committee moved the report. I think it was 25 for and 15 against to accept the CETA agreement, and it's now before the full European Parliament. The anticipation is mid-February. Now I don't know if we can meet those dates. I don't know how the house will move. All of us have been monitoring what is going on in the house side on CETA.
It has come out of committee with five amendments. Bear in mind, there is the CETA agreement and then there is the implementation agreement, and the five amendments that were accepted are in the new bill. It is in the house now.
What I'm proposing is that the government should be providing briefings to all of us imminently. We can do it collectively or individually. In the next little while, as we see it coming, we will have to determine how we handle it.
The house had a very short pre-study. Then they had a one-day meeting where the minister and officials were called, and then they moved on the bill with amendments. Some amendments were not accepted and some were. Amendments were accepted around the patent provisions. What I propose to do is have staff give us the amendments that were proposed in the house and those that were accepted and the ones that were defeated. That will give us a head's up.
We had a few people interested in coming to testify before us, so what the steering committee will have to do very shortly is determine how we will handle CETA here. Your advice on how we study CETA will be important. So that is future business but imminent future business.
Equally, the Canada-Ukraine trade agreement is also moving rather quickly through the house. It passed from the committee and was tabled yesterday, and so they are now at third reading. It is anticipated shortly. We're not sure when. Again, we will need briefings from the officials.
The negotiations that Ukraine has taken on with Europe have really been the standards that we adhere to. We have been monitoring over the last 5, 10, 15 years, maybe. Canadian officials have sat in on many of the negotiations of Ukraine's movement into a European setting. This agreement takes that into account, but of course it's a bilateral agreement. We'll need briefings on that, and we will see how quickly we'll get that agreement. We'll have to determine the process of study.
Again, in the House of Commons there was a one-day study in committee. There are some reasons for it and we can go into those later.
Those are the two alerts on the two big government pieces of legislation.
We have been working for some time on two private members' bills. We have had the hearings on the Magnitsky bill. A lot of work is done formally and informally on that bill. It has a history, which I hope I presented here.
We always advise government when we have a private member's bill and that we are handling it. We afford the government minister the opportunity to come forward. Generally ministers do not involve themselves with private legislation. They prefer to have private legislation dealt with by Parliament, and they determine their own policies and practices in how they deal with it. That appears to be the way Bill S-226 was going to be handled here.
Minister Dion agreed to come forward. The officials testified, and some of you were already on the committee when that occurred. Minister Dion offered to appear. We offered him some dates in December and he was not accepting of those dates due to varying reasons — his own agenda; he needed to be in the constituency, et cetera. I don't think we need to go into the details of that. We offered to sit any time in January, but he was not available then. He said when Parliament reconvenes he would be here.
We were in the position that we wanted to proceed, and we could not delay any further because we don't want to jeopardize dealing properly with the entire bill and we have to be efficient as the minister must be. We both have our issues.
The minister changed two weeks ago. So with the consultation of the steering committee, we sent a letter to the new minister, Chrystia Freeland, last week, congratulating her on her very important appointment and inviting her to come before the committee as we have invited other ministers to present their mandate letters so that we share information. We also said, however, in the letter that we were proceeding with Bill S-226, gave the background of Minister Dion, and asked for her indication as to whether she wished to appear. There was no reply.
I contacted the minister's office yesterday and said that we urgently needed to meet. There was a very kind response: "Yes, we're looking into it; we know the letter.'' Unfortunately we have not received a reply.
I'm proposing to again say to the minister that we will be proceeding tomorrow. I did that in consultation with the steering committee. We hope to go to clause by clause. Should anything change, I will alert you and that will be the status of that bill.
On Bill S-219, Senator Tkachuk was contacted. He has some witnesses, and the researchers have put forward more witnesses. It involves Iran.
For the new members, we did a report on Iran a number of years ago. In re-reading it, I think it's still very topical and timely on the major issues, but it was before the Iran nuclear deal. It had a lot of Canadian concerns and Canadian perspectives in it, so I would appreciate that being recirculated to new members.
The Iranian Canadian Congress has asked to appear. We had other witnesses before that were very helpful on the Canadian position. We have approved a few more witnesses. If you want to know the list, you can ask the clerk at any time. We don't normally circulate it because it's too much information. It is the job of the steering committee to vet them and combine them. If there are witnesses you know of, just give the names to the clerk or myself. We hope that we can deal with them in a few sessions and then be able to complete our study on that bill.
I've already said that I have congratulated Minister Freeland on your behalf.
I also sent a letter to Minister Champagne, the new Minister of Trade, and congratulated him and again issued an invitation about his mandate letter. Minister Champagne was not in trade.
Minister Freeland has had the good fortune to have done international trade, but it spills over into foreign policy. That was her area of interest.
I'm sure Minister Champagne is running fast and furious to try to catch up right now. We may not see him on the general topic, but we will continue to encourage him.
He will also have to appear before us on the two government bills. Our rule is always, no minister, no bill. That is routine through most committees now. That's where we are on that one.
We have some future business to deal with on the Mexico issue. I could have given part of the update but there is a part of Mexico that we can do and get your opinions on this.
Those are the issues that we are dealing with and the future studies and directions we can go in.
We will suspend and then will go in camera, which means we need five minutes. There will be interpretation but no recording.
I suggested to members who maybe need a refresher course to stick with us because I'll do the updates on these. I hope that all members will stay for this portion, and then we'll go into a fuller committee briefing. You might see some of the senior members leave at that point.
(The committee continued in camera.)