Peter Van Loan speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Thursday, October 8, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick
The Harper government is allowing an unprecedented expansion of Parliament's role in foreign relations, striking a deal with the Liberals that will amend the government's free-trade legislation with Colombia.
The Conservative bill now has the votes to pass through Parliament, after Trade Minister Peter Van Loan told the House of Commons Wednesday that his government will accept an amendment calling on Colombia and Canada to jointly produce annual reports on the human-rights impact of the deal in both countries.
In a minority Parliament where government and opposition MPs are regularly at war, the amendment provides an unusual example of behind-the-scenes co-operation and negotiation. It also sets the stage for future battles over trade deals.
"It's a change of our historic practice," said Peter Harder, a former deputy minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, who welcomed the development as a "very clever" way of ensuring human rights are addressed and that the deal passes through Parliament.
The government wants support for several other trade deals - including pacts with Panama and Jordan - and Mr. Harder said the Conservatives should now expect the opposition will want various side agreements with those as well.
On the floor of a near-empty House of Commons yesterday, Liberal MP Scott Brison offered the deal to Mr. Van Loan, who quickly accepted. But it was hardly a spur-of-the-moment arrangement.
Two months ago in the Swiss Alps ski resort of Davos, where the world's rich and powerful meet each year at the World Economic Forum, Mr. Brison slipped away to a room reserved for bilateral talks, and met with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Trade Minister Luis Plata.
There, Mr. Brison proposed wording for a side agreement that would see Canada and Colombia commit to annual reporting on the human rights impacts of a free trade agreement.
Over the following weeks, Mr. Brison and Mr. Plata exchanged texts as they worked to strike a deal, clinching it in mid-March. Mr. Van Loan said the government supported the interaction as long as it helped pass the bill.
"We certainly felt it would be a good idea for [the Liberals]to talk to the Colombians," he told The Globe and Mail yesterday.
Although U.S. senators, who must ratify American treaties, often hammer out the fine points of deals to ensure passage, in Canada such international deal-making has been the sole purview of the executive.
The unusual deal was driven by two things: the Harper government's decision to put foreign treaties to a vote in the Commons, and the minority Parliament.
Although the Conservative government signed the trade deal with Colombia in 2008, unions, human rights groups, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois have campaigned against it, arguing that the Uribe government has not turned around the country's woeful human rights record.
NDP MP Peter Julian dismissed yesterday's proposal for human rights reporting as "ridiculous," saying that only independent third parties can properly assess the situation in Columbia. He predicted an "avalanche" of human rights groups will speak against the deal in committee.
The Colombians understood that passage of a trade deal they wanted dearly meant winning Liberal support. Last June, Mr. Uribe took the unusual step of coming to Canada to appear before a Commons committee. He met with Liberal MPs a day earlier to lobby for passage of the free trade agreement.
In August, Mr. Brison and Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae went to Colombia for five days of meetings with opponents and supporters of the agreement, including sessions with Mr. Uribe and Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez.
Yesterday, after the minister said he would accept the amendment when the bill goes to committee, Mr. Brison said the agreement was a rare show of co-operation in what he said has otherwise been a "frustrating" minority Parliament.
"It's an example that we can make minority Parliaments work," he said.