Hi there. My name is Nik Barry-Shaw. I'm the trade and privatization campaigner with The Council of Canadians, which is a grassroots membership-based organization comprising 43 chapters across the country and uniting over 150,000 supporters from coast to coast to coast.

I'm happy to be here to speak about the CUSMA review because as some of you may know, the council was founded in 1985 in the crucible of debates around continental free trade, first with the United States and then with Mexico. Throughout our organization's history, we've campaigned against corporate trade deals like NAFTA that put profits before people and the planet.

The first thing I want to remark on is that we're in a strange moment. At the political and media elite level, there is a very strong consensus in favour of continuing with these trade deals as is, yet there is simultaneously a recognition that they've done a tremendous amount of harm to ordinary Canadians. Even diehard defenders of free trade, like Andrew Coyne, have basically been forced to admit that the economic results of the last 30 years have been dismal. In a recent column, Coyne wrote that despite Canada's trade and broader economic policies being “an example of everything that orthodox economics would recommend as recipes for prosperity”, Canada's productivity has slumped and growth rates have fallen. How could this be? Coyne wrote, “We did everything right!”

The confusion felt by defenders of that orthodoxy is not something that afflicted The Council of Canadians or its allies in the fight against these free trade deals. When they were first being negotiated, we argued that they would decimate manufacturing employment and drive down workers' wages in Canada as corporations restructured production in search of the lowest costs. We argued that investor-state dispute mechanisms, as in NAFTA's chapter 11, would allow corporations to sue governments even if they were pursuing legitimate efforts to regulate business and protect the environment. We argued that the pressure to attract increasingly footloose foreign investment through subsidies and corporate tax cuts would inevitably erode our fiscal base and therefore our public services, most notably our health care system.

It gives me no pleasure to note that these warnings from The Council of Canadians over the years about what free trade would bring to us are largely correct. Rather than a vigorous competitive economy, Canadians have an economic landscape dominated by oligopolies, the result of corporate consolidation on a continental scale, rather than a rising tide that lifts all boats. Canadians have experienced stagnant wages, rising prices, and spiralling income and wealth inequality.

The renegotiation of NAFTA into the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement brought several welcome departures from this tired and discredited economic orthodoxy, notably the removal of chapter 11 and the creation of the rapid response mechanism to protect Mexican workers against violations of their right to form a union. The 2026 review of the CUSMA is an opportunity to continue in this direction. For that reason, The Council of Canadians wholeheartedly supports efforts to expand enforceable labour rights protections by widening the scope and applicability of the rapid response mechanism to all workers in North America and to a broader list of labour rights violations. We also strongly believe that the last vestiges of NAFTA's chapter 11, which live on in the CUSMA's more limited chapter 14, should be done away with, as should investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms in other treaties that continue to constrain legitimate efforts to take on climate change and to protect the environment.

However, it's not clear to us that it's possible to fully reverse-engineer the CUSMA into a trade and investment agreement that places workers' rights, climate action and environmental protection ahead of corporate profits. Despite the removal of chapter 11, the CUSMA continues to hamper the Mexican government's efforts to reassert its energy and food sovereignty.

I'll just give you one recent example. In February 2023, the Mexican government announced its intention to ban the pesticide glyphosate and to phase out genetically modified corn. In response to the outcry from U.S. agribusiness, the U.S. government initiated a trade challenge, not under chapter 11 or chapter 14 but under chapter 31, citing violations of the CUSMA's sanitary and phytosanitary standards. While the Mexican government has emphasized the need to protect indigenous varieties of maize from genetic contamination by GM corn, the U.S. has attempted to narrow the issue to whether GM corn is safe to consume, claiming that Mexico's phase-out is not “science-based”.

The trouble with the regulatory standard in CUSMA, in addition to rejecting the precautionary principle and the wider concerns about food sovereignty that have motivated Mexico's decision, is that it ignores the enormous upstream efforts to warp the “science” deployed by agribusiness and other industries. As the Monsanto papers revealed, this went as far as recruiting scientists to publish studies that ultimately defended the safety of their products, some of which were secretly reviewed by Monsanto prior to publication.

This is an issue that The Council of Canadians, and especially its Northumberland chapter, has been paying a lot of attention to. Unfortunately, the Canadian government has sided with the U.S. in this dispute and has blocked the efforts of our Northumberland chapter to present arguments in favour of this phase-out.

I'll close by saying that the scale of the problems we face, including the climate crisis first and foremost, requires a rethinking of the entire economic model that these deals were meant to entrench. We need trade and investment agreements that will help rather than hinder the shift away from fossil fuels and the massive public investment in infrastructure and green manufacturing that it requires. We need trade deals that increase rather than erode workers' bargaining power, and we need trade deals that facilitate the rebuilding of our public services, which have been worn down by years of neglect.

Thank you.