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<title>MR. PETTIGREW - ADDRESS TO THE QUEBEC MANUFACTURERS AND EXPORTERS ON AFTER DOHA: BENEFITS FOR THE WORLD - MONTREAL. QUEBEC</title>
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<p><font size="+1"></font><font size="+1"><strong><u>CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY</u></strong></font><font size="+1"></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial" size="+1"><strong>NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS BY</strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial" size="+1"><strong>THE HONOURABLE PIERRE PETTIGREW,</strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial" size="+1"><strong>MINISTER FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE,</strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font face="Arial" size="+1"><strong>TO THE </strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font size="+1"><strong>QUEBEC MANUFACTURERS AND EXPORTERS</strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font size="+1"><strong>ON</strong></font></p>
<p align="CENTER"><font size="+1"><strong>AFTER DOHA: BENEFITS FOR THE WORLD</strong></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><strong>MONTREAL, Quebec</strong></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"><strong>December 3, 2001</strong></font></p>
<p><font size="+1"></font>Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about Doha.</p>
<p>The Doha Ministerial was the culmination of two years of hard work following the setback of Seattle -- and it has clearly
erased the stain of Seattle.</p>
<p>It also marked the beginning of a new stage in the long journey to a more prosperous, just and peaceful world. There is still
a long way to go on that journey, but we are proceeding with renewed confidence, vigour and purpose.</p>
<p>Let me outline the benefits of the Doha Development Agenda for Canada in terms of the three main forces driving modern
trade policy: the economic agenda, the social agenda and the development agenda.</p>
<p><strong>The Economic Agenda</strong></p>
<p>Trade remains primarily an economic force, as every Canadian businessperson knows. The WTO [World Trade
Organization] would quickly lose its relevance if it did not deliver results for business. And it does, all the time -- it
provides the stable, liberal, predictable rules-based environment earned through previous negotiations.</p>
<p>It also houses more or less continuous negotiations -- not just the market-opening deals in financial services and
information and communications technology of a few years ago -- but the ongoing negotiations with applicants to the
WTO. At Doha, we welcomed both China and Taiwan into the WTO system. I don't need to tell you how significant that
is.</p>
<p>With Doha, the WTO also offers the promise of new liberalization and new rules to extend fairness and predictability to
new domains, with a deadline of January 1, 2005 -- the same as the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas]!</p>
<p>There will be new vigour in the current services and agriculture negotiations, since the larger agenda surrounding them
allows for more ambition.</p>
<p>Specifically, the agriculture negotiations will aim at:</p>
<p>• substantial improvements in market access;</p>
<p>• substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support; and</p>
<p>• reductions, in export subsidies, with a view to phasing them out -- a historic concession by the European Union.</p>
<p>The services negotiations are now given firm deadlines for the exchanges of requests and offers; this will ensure that the
next phase of those negotiations keeps pace with the rest of the agenda.</p>
<p>There will be new market-opening deals through negotiations on tariffs and market access conditions. Coverage will be
comprehensive, with no <em>a priori</em> exclusions. E-commerce will remain free of customs duties, at least until the next WTO
Ministerial in 2003.</p>
<p>We could not convince developing countries to accept outright negotiations on investment or competition policy, and India,
in particular, blocked agreement on negotiations on trade facilitation and on transparency in government procurement.</p>
<p>This is obviously disappointing to us; but each of these areas has a substantive work program ahead of it, leading to
negotiations after the 2003 Ministerial Conference and following a decision on modalities.</p>
<p>I must open a parenthesis here. On the face of it, this looks like a deferred or rolling launch of negotiations, with only
modalities -- coverage, negotiating techniques and the like -- left to be decided. But India could not quite swallow that, so
they got the Chairman, Sheikh Kamal, to make an interpretive statement to clarify that the decision on modalities also
covered whether or not to negotiate.</p>
<p>You may have seen the United States and the European Union dismissing this statement and underlining, correctly, that
there is agreement on negotiations. But I have to say that the reality is that we have two years in which to convince India
and the other doubters, or they will throw up every conceivable roadblock to the progress of those negotiations.</p>
<p>Set against that is the success we achieved, thanks to American flexibility, on WTO rules on subsidies and countervailing
measures and on anti-dumping measures.</p>
<p>Negotiations will aim to clarify and improve the disciplines in these areas. This is strongly in Canada's long-term interest,
both as an importer and user of these instruments and as an exporter.</p>
<p>I have already been asked elsewhere whether this will help us deal with the United States on softwood lumber. Well, I
sincerely hope to have resolved the softwood lumber situation before these negotiations even get properly started, and
certainly long before they end!</p>
<p>Speaking of softwood lumber, aircraft subsidies and other matters of interest to Quebec manufacturers and exporters, we
also achieved agreement on negotiating improvements and clarifications to the WTO's dispute settlement system on a
faster track -- by May 2003.</p>
<p><strong>The Social Agenda</strong></p>
<p>Although the economic agenda is central, trade is about more than just jobs, investment, competitiveness and the rest of the
business agenda. </p>
<p>You have all seen the pressure the Government comes under -- not just from street protesters, but also from thoughtful and
informed critics of a domestic or international agenda that, in their view, favours economic goals over a balanced pursuit of
social, environmental and economic goals.</p>
<p>I do not say that I entirely accept these criticisms, which are often alarmist, overstated and based on the fear that change
will destroy that which we hold most dear.</p>
<p>The Government must certainly seek better outcomes across a range of policy areas, but we are not going to get very far if
we neglect or, worse, reject economic growth. Growth is not, and must not be, the enemy of social justice, of cultural
identity, of inclusiveness or of democracy. </p>
<p>That is why I am pleased that so many themes that we loosely call the "social agenda" were recognized in the Doha
Declaration. Let me just flag some of them.</p>
<p>• We reaffirmed the mutually supportive nature of an open and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system, protection
of the environment and promotion of sustainable development.</p>
<p>• We reaffirmed our 1996 declaration on internationally recognized core labour standards, and noted the International
Labour Organization's work on the social dimension of globalization.</p>
<p>• We reaffirmed the right of WTO members to regulate the supply of services.</p>
<p>• We committed to making the WTO's operations more transparent -- a particular goal of Canada's.</p>
<p>• We agreed, for the first time ever, to negotiate on the environment in three areas:</p>
<p>- the relationship between existing WTO rules and trade obligations set out under Multilateral Environmental Agreements
[MEAs], including those headquartered right here in Montreal;</p>
<p>- procedures for regular information exchange, including through reciprocal observerships, between WTO and MEA
secretariats; and</p>
<p> </p>
<p>- improved market access for environmental goods and services. This was a huge pill for developing countries to swallow.</p>
<p>It is not surprising that the rest of the European Union's highly ambitious agenda -- which they basically traded off against
agriculture and which included such practical matters as labelling requirements for environmental purposes -- was left to a
work program in the WTO's Trade and Environment Committee.</p>
<p>The WTO's detractors will say this is too little. But I can assure you, from my knowledge of how labour, environment,
transparency and other issues are seen in developing countries, that Doha represents a major step forward.</p>
<p>I plan to ensure that Canadians know that the Organization is attuned, not just to the needs of business, but also to the
expectations of our societies. There is a historic inevitability to this development: we cannot maintain the support of
Canadians for an open trade policy, regardless of the material benefits it brings them, if they are afraid of unintended and
unmanageable consequences.</p>
<p><strong>The Development Agenda</strong></p>
<p>The third main driver of modern trade policy is the development imperative, and there, too, I will invoke the notion of
historical inevitability.</p>
<p>Even before Seattle, the developing countries, which are the majority of the WTO membership, had been aggressively
advancing their interests -- which, by the way, are just about as diverse as those of the developed countries.</p>
<p>The main difference between 1999 and 2001, to my mind, is that the preparatory process was handled much better by the
Director-General of the WTO, Mike Moore, and the Chairman of the General Council, Hong Kong's Stuart Harbinson.
This time around, it was an inclusive process in which every participant had a voice, and every participant had a chance to
bring its issues to the table.</p>
<p>There were literally dozens of meetings between ambassadors in Geneva, covering the list of grievances over the Uruguay
Round -- the "implementation issues" -- and every other topic members wished to pursue at Doha.</p>
<p>But ambassadors can only take matters so far. Ministers, too, had to give their political guidance.</p>
<p>In Mexico at the beginning of September, and again in Singapore in mid-October, I took part in small but highly
representative meetings of ministers that gave guidance to Mike Moore about how to prepare our decisions for Doha. If it
hadn't been obvious before then, it was clear that development issues would have to be woven throughout the Doha
outcomes for them to have legitimacy in the eyes of the bulk of the WTO's membership.</p>
<p>By the Singapore meeting, three significant things had happened:</p>
<p>• inside the WTO, Stuart Harbinson had circulated his first draft text, which was premised on the launch of broader
negotiations and put the opponents on the defensive; this reflected his judgment, after exhaustive consultations, that the
membership collectively did want such negotiations;</p>
<p>• the slowdown in the United States and other major economies had become apparent to all, and was exacerbated for
certain industries by the attacks of September 11 -- so the importance of sending a signal of long-term confidence had
risen accordingly; and</p>
<p>• <font face="Arial">the crisis in Afghanistan had served to emphasize the consequences of the gulf between rich and poor
nations, and the urgent need for action to narrow the gap.</font></p>
<p>I should also mention that the United States Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, showed courage and leadership all the
way through the process, including at the mini-ministerial meetings, where he recognized that the United States would have
to blink on anti-dumping.</p>
<p>So the upshot was that we came into the Doha meeting with short, manageable texts of a declaration, an implementation
decision and, a late arrival, a TRIPs [trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights] and public health decision. All of
these held important benefits for the developed and developing worlds alike. In other words, we knew when we arrived that
success was within our reach.</p>
<p>And to clinch it, the texts on TRIPs and public health and on anti-dumping quickly gelled into results that were very good
for developing countries. These also stood to gain significantly from the agriculture decision, and -- depending on their
stage of development -- from every other part of the Doha Declaration as well.</p>
<p>Frankly, I think that a number of them will see, over the next two years, that a further enlargement of negotiations to
include investment, competition policy, trade facilitation and transparency in government procurement will also be in their
interests; but they will want to see the colour of our money on agriculture and other matters first, no doubt.</p>
<p>Many practical decisions were taken on implementation issues, though we were able to stand fast with the United States on
textiles and avoid calling into question our own commitments to our textiles and apparel industries. We were also able to
avoid a Brazilian-led attempt to seriously weaken subsidy disciplines on developing countries.</p>
<p>But the cumulative effect of the development debate up to and at Doha is not to be seen just in an analysis of the interests
served by this or that clause or decision.</p>
<p>It is felt through the fact that more than three quarters of the Declaration enshrines principles or directly addresses interests
of developing countries -- things like:</p>
<p>• improved access for the least-developed countries' exports, with the eventual objective of duty-free, quota-free access;</p>
<p>• work programs on small economies, on trade and transfer of technology and on trade, debt and finance;</p>
<p>• work on intellectual property issues of interest to them such as traditional knowledge and folklore;</p>
<p>• coherent international attention to technical cooperation and capacity building, both as a general goal and as a specific
element of the various negotiations and work programs agreed to; and </p>
<p>• the strengthening of "special and differential treatment" provisions.</p>
<p>I dare say some of you are wondering how all this will help Canada!</p>
<p>First, at the risk of stating the obvious, this development focus helps ensure domestic political support for the WTO and the
international system's efforts to reduce poverty and foster sustainable development. And solid support at home allows the
Government to play more confidently in the negotiations.</p>
<p>We must not pretend to ourselves that we won't be asked for money and for markets. And just because it is the right thing
to do in the interests of world development doesn't make it easy to do; so the more support we have from the people of
Canada -- whether for us in the Government or for you in business -- the easier it will be to seek out the best solutions all
around.</p>
<p>Second, we have many interests in common with developing countries, notably in the area of agriculture.</p>
<p>Third, the increasing focus on the actual needs of countries will automatically distinguish between the economic situations
of the Koreas and Brazils, with their powerful economies, and those of more fragile economies around the world. We
should not exaggerate their level of development, but we don't need to write them blank cheques either.</p>
<p>Fourth, trade and investment are a two-way street: markets that earn more are better markets for our exports of goods and
services, and offer better prospects for our investors.</p>
<p>And fifth, remember historical inevitability? India threw its weight around this time; next time, maybe it will be Brazil, and
then China.... We can perhaps channel the future down certain paths, but we -- the world community, not just Canada --
cannot thwart the logical outcome of raising social, environmental and economic standards of living worldwide.</p>
<p>Doha has given us the promise of progress on all three fronts -- economic, social and developmental. After Doha, there are
benefits for the world and benefits for everyone.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
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