By David Suzuki
Today’s global trade system is rooted in the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The idea then was that fostering interdependencies between nations would suppress the risk of world wars — 75 million had just died in the Second World War — and protect our common humanity from the atrocities of genocide, mass bombings, starvation, disease and conflict.
Global trade has since morphed into a regime that facilitates human and environmental exploitation, Indigenous dispossession and economic colonialism. Free trade has perpetuated global systems of toxic production and consumption rooted in oil, gas and coal extraction. Rampant exploitation of natural resources has left us in a world of unprecedented, raging global conflict.
Change is imminent, and Canada’s next government must make our country a global leader in re-imagining trade for people and the planet.
Given our shared border with the United States — the longest in the world — the next Canadian government must prioritize preventing U.S. human and environmental rights repression, catastrophic deregulation, assaults on vulnerable groups and populist economic policy from extending into Canada. With the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement up for review in 2026, our upcoming political leadership has an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to launch a new trade paradigm for Canada.
Instead of looking to renegotiate incremental improvements to CUSMA — a trade agreement that has predominantly propelled economic growth patterns rooted in resource extraction, land and water dispossession, environmental degradation and suppression of Indigenous rights — Canada should re-imagine its trade policy through a human rights, environmental and intergenerational equity lens.
Canada needs to break away from the hegemonic hold of the U.S., as our prosperity has never been more intimately linked with our capacity to uphold strong democratic institutions, respect and fulfil Indigenous rights, accelerate climate action and halt biodiversity loss.
Progressive new trade policies and agreements driven by global environmental objectives, as well as decades-old attempts through the United Nations General Assembly to reshape the global trade system and decolonize it, offer some direction.
The governments of New Zealand, Costa Rica, Iceland and Switzerland recently introduced an Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability that breaks ground by envisioning trade through a climate-protection lens. Despite some weaknesses, it’s the first treaty to introduce legally binding trade rules on fossil fuel subsidies. It eliminates trade barriers on an unprecedented number of environmental goods and services and introduces eco-labelling guidelines.
Unlike predominant trade agreements whose opening lines refer to the importance of liberalizing trade for robust economic growth, ACCTS immediately points to “the urgent action all nations must take to combat climate change as well as loss of biodiversity, pollution and other serious environmental challenges.”
The preamble goes on to recognize “that trade and trade policy can and must support climate change mitigation and adaptation, pollution prevention and control, and the sustainable use, protection or restoration of biodiversity, ecosystems and natural resources, including water and marine resources.”
It also mentions the “importance of active stewardship, guardianship and protection of natural surroundings” and emphasizes “the essential role the environment plays in the well-being of citizens and communities, including Indigenous Peoples, among others, and the importance of their contribution to efforts to pursue sustainable development objectives.”
In contrast, the re-negotiated (in 2020) CUSMA preamble doesn’t even mention global environmental objectives. Protecting human, animal and plant life is secondary to trade liberalization objectives, and environmental protection is seen primarily through the prism of national environmental law enforcement, rather than adoption of ambitious, climate science–aligned trade rules and economic policy. And while Canada entered into CUSMA’s 2018 negotiations intending to secure extensive protections for Indigenous rights, the final agreement fell short of reaffirming the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or the fundamental principle of free and prior informed consent.
We need to end economic globalization patterns that enrich polluting industries and the wealthy while harming the vulnerable working world. Canada should not only diversify trade, it should align itself with countries ready to centre human and environmental rights in trade policy. Rather than try to appease increasingly fascist foreign governments, we should be halting centuries of resource and labour exploitation. At the very least, Canada must follow the lead of countries such as New Zealand, Costa Rica, Iceland and Switzerland and make human and environmental rights part of trade agreements.
David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Quebec and Atlantic Canada Director General Sabaa Khan.
Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.
REFERENCES:
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade:
https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_e.htm
U.S. human and environmental rights repression:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/01/22/trumps-executive-orders-threaten-broad-range-human-rights
Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement:
Suppression of Indigenous rights:
https://www.iatp.org/PR-usmca-corn-dispute-ruling
United Nations General Assembly to reshape:
https://press.un.org/en/2022/ga12482.doc.htm
Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability:
Final agreement fell short:
Vulnerable working world:
