Under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Parliament passed Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). The goal of the legislation was to ensure access to affordable generic drugs for illnesses such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, since it was passed in 2004, it has been used only once. The whole CAMR was so complex and snarled in red tape that it has been proven to be completely ineffective.

Now, under the leadership of NDP MP Hélène Laverdière (Laurier–Sainte-Marie), the bill is back with the new number C-398. It will come up for a vote on Wednesday, November 28 — the week in which this edition of Island Tides circulates.

The need for the bill is clear. Less than half of HIV-positive mothers receive the drugs that can prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. Similarly, of babies with HIV-positive mothers who themselves are born HIV-free, less than half receive treatment to prevent transmission from their mother.

The changes to the CAMR included in this new bill will not create any new costs for Canada. They are consistent with the WTO’s decision to exempt life-saving drugs to the developing world from the patent-protection rules of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. And it does not seem that the Canadian pharmaceutical industry will publicly object to the bill. One would hope its passage is assured.

Private members bills are supposed to be free of ‘party discipline,’ that seemingly benign concept which I believe is the enemy of democracy. Quite a lot of Conservatives in the House voted for C-393 when it passed. Now it seems some are losing their commitment to its passage. In one conversation, a Conservative who had previously voted for passage told me, ‘I have three pharmaceutical companies in my riding. What happens if a generic drug is sold leading to the stealing of patents?’

We are in a tough fight–I am talking to MPs in all parties; the Grandmothers to Grandmothers groups and other organizations—from Stephen Lewis Foundation to UNICEF—are working hard. I will do my best to get this much needed bill passed.

Saanich-Gulf Islands News Alert

I had meant to add more to this column and talk about the bill, but this evening, after votes, something amazing happened. I went to the reception of Parliamentarians hosted by Macleans magazine and the annual vote for MPawards. All of us get to vote. There are no suggested winners. I had an inkling something was up when Macleanssent a photographer to take pictures of me in the riding during the Remembrance Day week. There are a lot of categories—Hardest Working MP, Best Constituency MP, Most Collegial MP, most knowledgeable MP, and so on. I had thought I might be in the running for ‘hardest working.’

So here’s the shocker: in a prize based on how MPs voted, I was chosen for the top award—‘Parliamentarian of the Year’! I am the first woman to receive the award, the first British Columbia MP to have this honour, and certainly the first Green MP to win.

I am still a bit shocked, and it is hard to absorb that I am actually ‘Parliamentarian of the Year.’ Winning this proves what I have always said—that my friends and peers in the House of Commons do appreciate a respectful and non-partisan approach. Thank you, constituents of Saanich-Gulf Islands, for taking the chance of electing a Green MP. I want to share this honour with all citizens; Saanich-Gulf Islands is the constituency of the year.

Thank you!

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It is in this sense that “life sciences” has become a hot commodity. While the Harper Conservatives seem allergic to any kind of science to monitor and expand our knowledge of life on earth—whether fresh water ecosystems (through the killing of federal support for the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area), the nature of polar atmospheric chemistry in terms of ozone and greenhouse gases (through the closing of the Polar Environmental Atmospheric Research Laboratory), the build up of toxic chemicals in marine mammals (shutting down the DFO marine contaminants program), to name a few, pressing for the commercial advantage of the global pharmaceutical industry is a “life science” Mr. Harper likes.

When contemplating the proposed, and now fast-tracked, Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA), many Canadians are concerned with the reality that the agreement will assist the pharmaceutical industry in retaining patent protection longer, undercutting generic drugs and driving up prices for critical medicines.

Trade agreements still masquerade as though they were about trade. Little wonder. They still get away with being described as “trade agreements.”   The term “trade agreement” should be reserved for agreements, like the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); one of the last agreements actually about trade in goods. Ever since the Uruguay Round of the GATT, leading to the creation of the World Trade Organization, agreements have shifted from the focus on elimination of tariffs and other barriers to trade in goods, to the greater economic integration of national economies in the interest of corporate profits. And the shifting of balance away from national policies designed to improve the health of a domestic economy to assisting transnational corporations in deriving ever-higher profits is well demonstrated in the CETA provisions to aid Big Pharma.

While Canadians bemoan the “health-care crisis,” the single fastest rising component of health care is the cost of pharmaceutical drugs. The costs are “justified” by claims that the pharmaceutical industry invests an enormous amount in research that can only be captured through drug prices that far exceed the actual cost of production of the drugs in question. That allegation is false. Recent studies from around the world have debunked this claim. (Light, et al., “Will lower drug prices jeopardize drug research: a policy fact sheet,” American Journal of Bioethics, 2004.)

Meanwhile, the regulation of pharmaceutical products is failing Canadians. The excellent work by the Therapeutics Initiative at University of British Columbia is well worth replicating across Canada (www.ti.ubc.ca). Using an objective, evidence-based approach, the Therapeutics Initiative (TI) has saved lives and dollars by advising the B.C. government of drugs, approved by Health Canada, which, in their assessment, posed more risks than benefits. Due to the TI assessment, British Columbia did not approve Vioxx or cholinesterase inhibitors for Alzheimer’s patients. In fact, the TI approach was so successful that it was targeted by Big Pharma and pressure was brought to bear on the B.C. government to cease its funding.

This is not the time to abandon scientific rigour when it comes to pharmaceuticals. It is one of the largest corporate profit-centres on the planet, and its ethics are not squeaky clean. GlaxoSmithKline agreed in July to plead guilty to fraud and to pay $3-billion in the United States for illegal promotion of Paxil in what is the largest settlement ever with Big Pharma.

Giving the pharmaceutical industry more power to drive up drug costs faster is not in the public interest—not in Canada and not in Europe. The fact that we are in the midst of negotiations operating on the assumption that this is a worthy policy goal is evidence of just how unhinged the public good has become from public policy.

While discussing life sciences, we need to bring to bear actual evidence-based science in the interest of protecting life. What a novel approach.

Elizabeth May is the Leader of the Green Party of Canada and Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands.
Originally printed in the Hill Times.

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Others in this House might not have been thinking throughout this debate of the famous palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal — Panama. As members know, a palindrome is something that reads the same forward and backward. Unfortunately, I cannot read this trade deal as anything but backward. When the man is the Prime Minister and the plan is this free trade agreement, we do not get anything very progressive. We do not get a canal; we get a ditch.

We have a very small level of trade with Panama. While we see the Conservatives trying their best to gather up as many small trade agreements as possible, such as the one we passed with Jordan and this one with Panama, it is worth bearing in mind the level of trade that is currently at stake.

In 2010, there was just under $214 million in trade in goods between Canada and Panama. We do not expect this to go up very much even with a free trade agreement. If we look at previous free trade agreements with countries like Costa Rica and other small bilateral free trade agreements, we find that in a number of cases our trade has declined after signing the agreements.

We have a global trading framework already which includes the general agreement on tariffs and trade, and under the Uruguay round the creation of the World Trade Organization. We are not labouring any longer as a global society of nations under high tariffs and protectionist measures. They have been mostly slashed.

What would one want in trading and approving a trade agreement with Panama?

We have heard much in this House of the need to improve labour rights within Panama. We have heard that Panama continues to be a nation that traffics heavily in narcotics and drugs, and the rest of the world would like to stem their flow. We also know that Panama is a country that has extensive money laundering problems. This agreement does nothing to address these issues.

When we look at the ways in which Panama has operated as a tax haven, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Panama is one of 26 jurisdictions in the world that have not yet fulfilled their promise as of 2002 to provide tax sharing information. That would provide a greater understanding of when a country is operating unfairly and illegally to harbour revenue and wealth so that the country of origin cannot tax it properly.

The trade agreement with Panama unfortunately does not deal with any of these issues. It does not deal with narcotics trading. It does not deal with the tax haven problem. It does not deal with money laundering. It does have a side agreement to deal with labour, but we can already measure from previous efforts with such side agreements that they have no real effect on improving labour conditions in a country. 

Through the 1990s there was a great increase in trade agreements and a great wave of globalization. Its triumphalism was the creation of the World Trade Organization, but things have slightly stalled since Doha and there is a little less triumphalism. Some people feel that trade, trade liberalization and greater economic activity, particularly greater strength and power to corporations, will raise all boats. Gus Speth, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme, famously said, “This kind of trade raises all yachts”, but it does not do much for the poor. It certainly does nothing to improve labour conditions. If we negotiate a trade agreement while turning a blind eye to the things about our trading partner that worry us, things like drug trafficking, money laundering, human rights abuses, tax havens and places to shelter income that should be taxed under public revenue elsewhere, it is unlikely we would be able to fix them later.

Turning to the text of the agreement, in article 106 there are some carve outs so that the agreement would not unfairly target multilateral environmental agreements. I wish the trade negotiators for Canada had listed all the agreements that are important. They certainly have carved out the ones that were listed in NAFTA, such as, CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Montreal protocol on the ozone layer, the Basel convention on the transport of hazardous materials, the Rotterdam convention on trade in hazardous goods, and the Stockholm convention on persistent organic pollutants. 

A startling omission, since both Panama and Canada are parties to the framework convention on climate change, is that the framework convention on climate change is not listed as an agreement that would be protected against any incidental accidental implications from this trade agreement to climate policies. As we speak, both Canada and Panama remain parties to the Kyoto protocol, although we know that Canada has signalled its intention, quite shamefully I may add, to withdraw from its legal commitments there. I would not expect to see the Kyoto protocol in this agreement, but I certainly expected to see the United Nations framework convention on climate change, to which both countries are currently committed.

More concerning are the sections that appear in chapter 9 of the Canada-Panama free trade agreement. Chapter 9 deals with the quite devastating investor state provisions.

It sounds like the most boring of topics, an investor state provision. What could it be and why do we care? I want all Canadians to care. This provision is our innovation. We were the first anywhere on the planet to create this provision. It was done in NAFTA. In NAFTA, it is chapter 11. In the Canada-Panama agreement it is chapter 9, but it has the same effect.

There was an effort to make this kind of provision global. Some may remember the efforts were negotiated within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It started within the World Trade Organization, but it stalled there. At the WTO they were called multilateral investor agreements. They regrouped and went to the OECD and called them the multilateral agreement on investment, the MAI instead of the MIA. It stalled and failed there. Thank goodness. It was the result of widespread grassroots opposition.

It is the first truly global campaign I have ever seen where grassroots groups using the Internet reached out to each other. I remember one parliamentarian saying to me at the time, “I can’t imagine that any Canadian citizen is really worried about something called the multilateral agreement on investment”. He came back to me a few days later, after he had been on an MPs’ study tour and said that while he was paying for gas at a station in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, he saw on a clipboard a petition to stop the MAI. It contained several pages of signatures.

Why do Canadians at the grassroots and people globally not want more investor state provisions? I should say that once it failed at the OECD, largely thanks to France, but other countries ran to catch up, once it failed there, they abandoned it. By they I am referring to the corporate entities that are pursuing the notion that corporations should have powers superior to those of elected legislatures. The essence of an investor state provision is that multilateral corporations should be able to trump decisions made by democratically elected parliaments and legislatures around the world and they should be able to sue a country if that country passes legislation that a corporation does not like. That is the essence of it. It is not in any traditional way an expropriation.

They have taken it from global to doing it BIT by BIT, literally the acronym BIT, bilateral investment treaty, such as this one. They are collecting up by BITs to replace what they could not do directly, a global agreement that allows corporations to sue governments when governments take action, even when that action is not in any way designed to inhibit trade. It is as such when Canada banned a toxic gasoline additive, or when Canada took steps to ban the export of PCB contaminated waste pursuant to the Basel convention I mentioned earlier, or in the very sad and tragic case of Metalclad, a U.S. corporation. Metalclad wanted to put a toxic waste site next to a little community in Mexico called San Luis Potosi. The people of San Luis Potosi said no, that it was too close to their water source and they would not let that giant U.S. corporation, Metalclad, put its toxic waste disposal facility there. Under chapter 11 of NAFTA, Metalclad sued the federal state of Mexico. 

This agreement means that any corporation with a mailbox in Panama can claim to be an investor and sue Canada at the municipal, provincial or federal levels for any decision it does not like, that it feels impedes its expectation of profits.

In the case of poor little San Luis Potosi, Mexico ended up owing Metalclad just under $17 million.

I fear that my time to speak to this agreement may be coming to a close. I want to conclude by saying firmly and clearly that we must learn from what has gone wrong with chapter 11 of NAFTA and stop including investor-state provisions as an automatic, unthinking addition to every single trade agreement we negotiate.

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1992—The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

The story starts 20 years ago with the over-arching climate treaty. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated between 1990 and 1992, and was signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (the ‘Earth Summit’).

Canada was the first industrialized country to both sign and ratify the UNFCCC, doing so in 1992. Signing is the easy part, usually done at a conference. Ratification is necessary for an international instrument to have legal force. It is typically conducted by a vote in a nation’s legislature.

In Canada, ratification can take place by a decision of the Privy Council (Cabinet). The UNFCCC ratification in 1992 was by Cabinet.

In the United States, ratification of treaties requires not only a vote in the Senate, but that it pass by a two-thirds vote. This additional Constitutional hurdle is why even when the US Senate has a Democratic majority, the Administration has not submitted Kyoto for ratification. However, the US did sign on to the UNFCCC under the Bush Administration, and the US Senate ratified it.

The Climate Change Threat—Assessment and Action

The UNFCCC confirms that climate change is a real threat. Its objective is ‘the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.’

The difficulty, of course, is the word ‘dangerous.’ When does the additional loading of greenhouse gases from human activity (an amount far smaller than the beneficial natural levels) cease to be beneficial and become dangerous?

The answer to that comes through the guidance of another UN agency, one established for this purpose back in 1988. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is comprised of scientists appointed by governments. Their summary reports, Advice to Policy Makers, tackle this question. Whereas the danger level was once thought to be twice the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon dioxide (going from 275 parts per million to 550 ppm), the IPCC has constantly revised downward as evidence of danger comes into sharper relief.

The head of the IPCC has confirmed we should work to halt the global rise in GHG emissions such that by 2015, global emissions stop growing and begin to fall. The growing consensus is that emissions need to stabilize at 350 ppm, even though we are now at 390 ppm.
As well, the UNFCCC established the ‘precautionary principle’ which sets out:

‘Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures, taking into account that policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost.’

There are many other provisions within the UNFCCC, including calling on governments to both reduce emissions (‘mitigation’ in convention-speak) and adapt to those levels of climate change which are no longer avoidable (‘adaptation’).

What’s Missing

What the UNFCCC did not do was assign timelines and deadlines to the general promise to reduce emissions. Prior to the Rio Earth Summit,
former US President George HW Bush said that if the UNFCCC included deadlines and timetables he would refuse to attend the event, declaring, ‘The American lifestyle is not on trial.’

All countries have signed and ratified the UNFCCC, making them ‘parties’ to the agreement. Once enough countries had ratified to make the treaty enter into force, annual meetings called the Conference of the Parties (COP) began.

1997—The Kyoto Protocol

The third Conference of the Parties, COP3, under the UNFCCC was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan. Its goal was to bring forward the timeline and deadlines that had not been possible in Rio. There was optimism it would be possible to come to agreement. Optimism came from two events: the replacement of Bush with Clinton, and the success of a protocol to protect the ozone layer.

The Montreal Protocol on the Ozone Layer had been concluded in 1987, dealing with the Reagan Administration. (I was part of the Canadian team in Montreal. That’s another story, but I recall US Interior Secretary Don Hodell trying to block progress by saying we didn’t need to get rid of ozone-depleters. We only needed sunscreen and broad-brimmed hats!)

As early as 1995, at the first COP in Bonn, Germany, the model of the Montreal Protocol was mandated for the climate protocol. The Montreal Protocol had gotten all countries on Earth, rich and poor, to sign on.

The core principle was called ‘common but differentiated responsibilities.’

All countries agreed that as the problem had been caused by the wealthy industrialized countries, those countries would face specific time-limited commitments while the developing countries could actually increase their use of ozone depleters in the short term.

Once the industrialized world has demonstrated it’s bona fide (and developed the alternatives), the developing world takes on firm cuts as the agreement moves forward. The protocol also committed that parties would be influenced by the scientific advice as it changed.

The only significant difference between the Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol was that the ozone agreement had effective enforcement mechanisms. If any party violated the protocol, other parties could bring trade sanctions against them. With the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, and the mere questioning of whether environmental treaties might impede trade, Canada announced we would not sign any agreement in Kyoto that included trade sanctions. And we were not alone.

That failure is why there are no financial penalties should Canada stay in Kyoto and fail to meet targets.

Kyoto set out a combined set of firm emissions reductions that should have taken the industrialized world to 5.2% below 1990 levels by the end of this year. In fact, of those countries that made serious efforts, they collectively did reach the 5% goal. The EU, having committed to 8% reductions, actually hit a goal closer to 20% below.

But the United States under George W Bush reneged and never ratified. And, as we all know, the economies of China, India and Brazil grew enormously. Today, China is the world’s biggest polluter, but it is still a relatively small contributor to our existing problem. It only overtook the US as largest polluter recently.

Looking at the atmosphere as though it were a garbage dump (which is how we treat it), the overflowing mess from the last 100 years is still there. The mess from the last few years is certainly serious, but the industrialized world’s ‘historic’ pollution is not history. It operates every day to disrupt the climate we used to know.

As you know from the Durban updates in the past two editions of Island Tides, there is now a second commitment period under Kyoto. Without that commitment, China, India and Brazil made it clear they would not take on any hard and fast cuts down the road.

We need Kyoto. And we need to keep Canada in Kyoto. Under Article 27 (2) of the Kyoto Protocol, a party can file a legal intention to withdraw. It takes effect one year from the date it was received.

Canada is in Kyoto until December 2012. And we need public pressure to keep us there.

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