Parliamentarians are not puppets.

• Author: Bergeron, Stephane
• Position: Another Perspective on Parliament and International Trade

Only a handful of legislators were present in Seattle and just under a hundred in Doha, but there were several hundred parliamentarians from the world in Cancun, Mexico, from September 10 to 14, for the 5th WTO Ministerial Conference. This number is an eminently clear indication of the increased role parliamentarians intend to play in defining the parameters governing the trade liberalization process. This article by one of the members of the federal delegation, argues that the role of parliamentarians at these meetings is still very limited.

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Canada can pride itself on having assembled one of the largest parliamentary delegations in Cancun: a dozen parliamentarians in total, not including the federal ministers themselves and the few provincial ministers attending. That said, it is one thing to trot out a line of parliamentarians to impress the gallery; quite another to closely involve them with the negotiation process itself. Physically distanced from the hermetic alcoves where these negotiations were taking place, parliamentarians had practically no say in Cancun and little opportunity to have much impact on the progress of these negotiations or on the government's positions. The federal parliamentarians and provincial ministers were essentially extras and as such, forced to hang around outside the doors of federal senior officials and ministers, who had been given the authority to negotiate on behalf of all of Canada, in an effort to extract a few snippets of information or to whisper their expectations furtively.

We had to depend on the daily public information sessions (broadcast in part on the webcam), in which we could participate on equal footing with representatives of various lobby groups and NGOs if we wished to give ourselves the illusion that we had made a constructive contribution to the Cancun conference. Oh, we certainly could have held our own information sessions (not broadcast on the webcam) and we did organize a few, extremely interesting, meetings with foreign parliamentarians where we could discuss issues of common interest, but nothing, committing the government.

It is perhaps not very gratifying to admit, but the idea that parliamentarians should be more closely involved in the process of negotiating international treaties and agreements, particularly in trade matters, is not part of Canada's philosophy or its traditional practices. The Minister for International Trade, Pierre Pettigrew, said that the "more...