The Dominion - Free Trade Agreements

The CETAstration of Canadian Municipalities

Miles — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:41:23 +0000

Pending trade agreement with EU only benefits big business

CHARLOTTETOWN—As Canada negotiates its furthest reaching free trade agreement to date, cities and towns across the country are sounding warning bells that it could change local governance as we know it.

The Canadian government is negotiating a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union. The accord goes far beyond the reach of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), offering unrestricted trade in goods, services and investments between the 27 EU nations and all levels of Canadian government.

“The first thing to realize is that it [CETA] involves far more than trade,” says Scott Sinclair, Senior Research Fellow with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). He warns of the potential for the deal to greatly affect municipalities’ ability to govern.

The agreement has become known as the “next-generation” deal because of the degree to which it includes all aspects of trade, covering intellectual property, standards and regulations, settlement dispute resolutions, services, investments and government procurement.

The biggest business leaders in Canada and Europe have been the driving force behind the negotiations. They stand to profit, particularly through the agreement's offer of sub-national procurement contracts, which is creating worry and opposition within municipalities.

Municipal-level governments traditionally use procurement contracts to benefit the local economy, opening bids, or a tender contracts, that target local businesses. These local contracts create jobs and opportunities in the region, and and can promote certain kinds of development policies.

But under CETA, non-federal contracts, formerly exempted from free trade agreements, will soon be open to any and all competition, and not limited to local businesses or groups.

Example: the City of Charlottetown, PEI, recently announced an $18 million combined sewer contract that will be opened up to local Maritime engineering, construction and water treatment companies.

For a major project such as this, Charlottetown might look to local contractors for the construction services in order to create jobs in the community. The project may also use the tenders to support environmental or other development initiatives.

However if CETA becomes law, Charlottetown would lose its authority to choose to hire locally and to choose to which parties to grant the procurement contract.

The EU is pushing for a “non-discrimination” clause within the CETA agreement that would mean the procurement terms would apply to all levels of government: when any government calls a bid, it must be open to foreign investors as well as local or national ones.

Minimum limits (or “thresholds”) are in place to distinguish projects and services that are worthwhile to open to foreign investors, which allow smaller contracts to remain outside the purview of the CETA. These limits have been criticized as being too low; they are modelled off of World Trade Organization figures and are set at $340,600 for goods and services and $8.5 million for construction projects.

Charlottetown city councillor Cecil Villard admitted that while the thresholds pose little to no threat for a municipality the size of his city, larger municipalities have much to lose. “My first reaction was that I would be more concerned about the level of thresholds if I were a big city. Toronto’s, Vancouver’s, and Montreal’s are sure to feel the impact,” Villard told The Dominion in an interview.

In fact, municipalities have been calling for a complete exemption from the agreement. The City of Toronto passed a resolution on March 6 demanding its exemption from CETA. And Toronto is not alone: Montreal, Hamilton, Burnaby, Prince Albert and Kingston have all passed resolutions to safeguard their rights to local governance.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) has submitted seven principles to International Trade Minister Ed Fast and the negotiating team. The principles lay out the protections it would like to see in CETA. The Council of Canadians and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) have also launched a major national campaign to educate and empower the public on the potential consequences of CETA.

As pointed out in a recent NDP report, CETA “deprives provincial and municipal governments of crucial economic levers, particularly during economic downturns, to use government purchasing to stimulate the economy and encourage local spinoffs.”

CETA fails to recognize the autonomy of municipalities and is solely playing to the interests of big businesses, say its critics. “It's a bill of rights for corporations,” according to Leo Broderick, Vice Chair of the Council of Canadians.

Inspired by the concept of social justice, Chera-Lee advocates for human and environmental rights through community and legal initiatives from Charlottetown.

CETA versus Canadian Municipalities

NB Port Workers Said NO CANDU

Moira Peters — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:11:24 +0000

Argentina honours Saint John longshoremen for 1979 act of solidarity

They said, “We don’t care about our wages
and we don’t care about the boss.
When your brothers and sisters are dying,
there’s lines you just don’t cross.”
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!
No Hot Cargo for Argentina!

—Maritimes folk singer Nancy White, in “No Hot Cargo,” a song inspired by the 1979 event this article celebrates.

FREDERICTON—Hundreds gathered at Lily Lake Pavilion in Saint John on Saturday, March 13, to honour the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 273 for what has been called "the single most dramatic example of Canadian trade union solidarity with workers in the Third World."

Argentina’s Ambassador to Canada, Arturo Guillermo Bothamley, presented the Orden de Mayo to Pat Riley, business agent for the Saint John Local of the ILA, for the union’s 1979 protest that prevented the shipment of heavy water to Argentina’s military dictatorship—an action that resulted in the release of 11 political prisoners. The Orden de Mayo is the highest award given by the Argentine government to citizens of another country for courage, honour and solidarity.

“We are going to pay an old debt from the heart to some people who put their security at risk for people thousands of miles away,” said Bothamley at the ceremony.

On the morning of July 3, 1979, port workers refused to cross a picket line on the west side of the Saint John harbour the day the workers were supposed to ship a load of heavy water to Argentina for the CANDU nuclear reactor Argentina had bought from Canada in 1973. Heavy water is a component necessary for the functioning of nuclear reactors fueled by unenriched uranium.

The picket had been organized by the NO CANDU committee, the New Brunswick Federation of Labour, and the Saint John and District Labour Council. With signs and buttons stating, "NO CANDU FOR ARGENTINA," and "HOT CARGO," the protesters demanded the release of 17 political prisoners in Argentina, most of whom were trade unionists.

The action was part of a national campaign started by the Group for the Defence of Civil Rights in Argentina—initiated by Argentine expatriates—in response to the brutal military dictatorship that took power in Argentina in 1976.

“The 1979 Argentine military junta was a rogue government in league with other rogue governments, such as the government of South Africa, which was itself notorious for its apartheid policies and its similar threat of acquiring nuclear capabilities," said Riley at the award ceremony.

"The military junta’s most appalling practices were not well-known. Whether you were a newspaper editor, a university professor or a university student, a trade unionist, or simply a person of conscience, you could well disappear if you spoke out about the inhuman practices of the junta.”

It is estimated that 10,000-30,000 people were tortured, murdered or “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983. The government of Canada was enthusiastically supporting business with Argentina, including the export of nuclear technology, despite the Argentine government’s refusal to sign the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The picket line was joined by members of many local unions, including the Canadian Paperworkers, the United Auto Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Church groups and members from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, Project Ploughshares and the Maritimes Energy Coalition also joined the picket.

As a result of the protest, 11 of the 17 political prisoners were released within days and three were sent into exile.

Another prisoner identified by the NO CANDU campaign, union leader Alberto Piccinini, was released a year later. During a visit to Canada, he expressed his gratitude to a group of Canadian workers: “Unity is the unity of all of us; and it must go beyond national boundaries. I am very clear that I am free today because of the struggle first of the people in my country and second because of workers elsewhere—especially in this beautiful country.”

At the March 13 award ceremony, Saint John mayor Ivan Court spoke of the workers’ decision to respect the picket line on the July morning, 31 years ago: “People matter first and foremost... So when the longshoremen in this city in 1979 said to the boss, ‘We’re not crossing the picket line. Life is more important than a paycheck,’ that’s what Saint John is all about... People were willing to say, ‘no,’ and ‘no’ did save lives,” he said.

"They were ordinary people knowing that they were doing something to try and change the living conditions—the lives—of people a long way away," said Barbara Byers of the Canadian Labour Congress at the ceremony. "But they were ordinary people taking extraordinary actions. They were ordinary people making history."

Byers went on to draw connections to current political issues in Latin America, including the recent coup d’etat in Honduras and the proposed Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement:

Today the widespread military dictatorships may be on the wane, but we now have a dictatorship of the free markets and free trade agreements. And the labour movement has been at the forefront of the resistance to that new kind of dictatorship going back to the fight against the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. We learned many lessons from those struggles and we are applying them to the current fight to oppose the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Colombia may not be ruled by a military dictatorship, but human rights violations taking place in that country are equally surreal. The dirty war there is being waged against trade unionists and leaders who dare to organize a union, lead a strike or oppose the government in any way.

Upon accepting the Orden de Mayo from Ambassador Bothamley, Pat Riley expressed his gratitude for the recognition of their action 31 years ago, and reflected on the event.

“The story of the 1979 NO CANDU for Argentina picket line was a story of immense courage, ingenuity and resolve. For the disappeared political prisoners. For the mothers of the disappeared. For the Group for the Defence of Civil Rights in Argentina. For the NO CANDU for Argentina committee and so many others. For the 1979 Port of Saint John picket line and demonstration. The determination to see justice done...was a path for those involved,” said Riley.

Marie-Christine Allard is a member of the New Brunswick Media Co-op. An original version of this article was published by the New Brunswick Media Co-op.

Argentina honours Saint John longshoremen

Canada's Deadly Trade Deals

dawn — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:30:15 +0000

An interview with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program of the International Relations Center

MONTREAL–One of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first major foreign visits after being elected in 2006 to his first minority government was to Latin America and the Caribbean. The trip aimed to promote a Canadian foreign policy focused on establishing "new partnerships in the Americas."

Canada has aggressively pushed to establish trade agreements in the Americas, and in pursuit of this signed bilateral trade deals with Peru and Colombia in 2009. Concurrent with the push towards more trade pacts in the Americas, Canada has cut the number of nations receiving bilateral aid through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Today's Canadian foreign aid policy sees a smaller number of countries being targeted for aid through the Conservatives' "countries of concentration" policy, which limits aid to 20 nations. The policy focus centres on trade with Latin America and the Caribbean, while aid to African nations, including Kenya, Cameroon and Rwanda, has been cut.

These shifts in policy are seemingly influenced by Canadian corporations that hold significant sway over government economic policy, such as mining, oil and gas corporations.

Bilateral agreements in the Americas signal this important shift. Canada’s trade agreement with Colombia has been the subject of intense criticism from labour unions in both Colombia and Canada.

The current Colombian government is embroiled in political scandals over ties to right-wing paramilitary groups that target and assassinate labour activists, Indigenous people, and members of popular and community movements. Human rights activists argue that a bilateral agreement with Canada lends international legitimacy to Alvaro Uribe's government in the face of such gross breaches of human rights.

"As for labour rights and the freedom of association, the FTA [with Canada] is a shameful reward for government and managers when it comes to violating these rights, forgetting more than 2,700 murdered unionists and letting their killers go unpunished,” outlined a February 2009 declaration to the Canadian government from Colombia’s major trade union federations.

Canada’s bilateral negotiations with Colombia come at a time when a similar US-Colombia trade accord has been halted in the United States by Congress due to concerns expressed by US law makers about human rights violations in Colombia and its government's connection with such activity.

US trade policy in the Americas was a major topic in the recent US elections. During the final campaign debate, Barack Obama slammed attempts by the Bush administration to sign a bilateral trade agreement with Colombia:

“Labour leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis [in Colombia] and there have not been prosecutions,” he said.

Despite the open concerns south of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pushed forward the Canada-Colombia deal.

Canada’s accord with Colombia is rooted in the same free market economic policies enshrined in NAFTA, which have been the subject of opposition from labour unions and peasant associations across Mexico, the US and Canada for over a decade.

Resistance by social movements successfully halted the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, which would have seen a single trade zone throughout the hemisphere.

The governments of Canada and the US have since shifted their focus to creating bilateral and regional trade deals in the Americas, spelling out a new policy battleground for the upcoming years that will undoubtedly be fought out both on the streets and within the halls of power.

In the interview that follows, Laura Carlsen, Director of the Americas Program of the International Relations Center based in Mexico City, outlines some specific economic and social impacts of existing free trade agreements on Mexico and throughout the Americas.

Stefan Christoff: First, can you outline the social and economic impacts of NAFTA as related to migration from Mexico to the US, and also within the contemporary context of the push by the US towards bilateral agreements?

Laura Carlsen: NAFTA marked the first time that there was a major trade agreement between two developed countries, including the largest economic power in the world and Mexico, a developing country, which presents major challenges in negotiating a free trade agreement.

Despite the inequality between the economies of Mexico and the US in regards to size and productive capabilities, the agreement basically delivered tremendous privileges to transnational corporations in the US to the detriment of Mexico.

Since NAFTA has been in effect we have seen serious damage done by the accord on Mexican society. There have been serious impacts on people in the countryside and also to small-to-medium size industries throughout the country, leading to growing rates of unemployment and a doubling of the rate of migration from Mexico to the US. The economic impacts of NAFTA have created serious internal displacement and forced migration.

Christoff: Similar trade policies to NAFTA in Latin America have played a major role in forced migration. Could you address, for example, how the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) has impacted migration?

Carlsen: The CAFTA agreement is also going to lead towards increased outward migration. All the Central American countries have been going through an economic restructuring along the lines of these free trade agreements, leading to free trade zones where assembly workers are dealing with [working] conditions that are very bad and wages that are very low.

People are displaced from the rural areas in large numbers due to foreign imports upsetting local market values, creating the conditions for forced migration.

Essentially these [trade] agreements lock in an export-oriented model of development, a model which according to other experiences in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, benefits a very small group of people while causing serious dislocation for many social sectors.

Along the Guatemala-Mexico border a couple of years ago, most of the people waiting to cross into Mexico were then going to move on to the US: farmers who had been displaced by imports, or by growing corporate control over prices of commodities such as coffee; farmers who could not make a basic living from harvesting their crops.

CAFTA will only increase this process of displacement, as the foreign businesses that move in work on an export-oriented farming production model, not employing a huge amount of local people, while the economic benefits are directed towards a very small social sector.

Often it is claimed that such agreements bring in foreign investment, however the lived experience is that foreign investment doesn’t come pouring in the minute you sign an agreement. On the contrary, the economic impact is generally negative. In the majority of Latin American countries subject to such trade agreements, we are seeing a net outflow of capital.

Christoff: In your time within regions impacted by NAFTA, can you outline how this agreement has impacted people, specifically small farmers and peasants?

Carlsen: It is best to examine a specific town; for example, a village within the Mixteca Indigenous region in Oaxaca, in the mountains where many families live [through] a combination between subsistence farming and selling corn on the regional market.

As NAFTA came into effect, we began to see large amounts of subsidized, cheap agricultural imports, specifically corn, coming in from the US, causing domestic prices in Mexico to dive.

For local farmers who rely on selling small amounts of corn to survive this was a devastating shift in the local and regional markets in Mexico, which undermined their ability as family farmers to survive.

Given the US corn imports, the Mixteca region in Oaxaca has become one of the major out-migration regions in Mexico, with townships that are showing negative population growth, specifically due to out-migration to the US.

Many local farmers in Mexico who used traditional farming methods, working often without mechanized equipment, without fertilizing chemicals, were displaced by NAFTA, given cheap US imports.

It was clear that such farmers would face displacement even before the agreement was signed. A US trade representative outlined at the time of NAFTA’s signing that US trade analysts were expecting around three million local farmers in Mexico to be displaced by the agreement. It was argued that these farmers would move into more modern and competitive industries, particularly the industrial corridors that were being constructed in the countryside, often by foreign corporations.

However, in reality, the massive displacement happened, in the millions, but the new jobs never arrived to Mexico, so people were left with nothing. Today, many local farmers are simply growing corn to survive. Often women are left on the farms with the family to survive while the men travel to the US to work. Major rural displacement caused by NAFTA has been very clear.

In villages within Oaxaca and throughout the country, many, many people are migrating to work in the US due to trade policies that have made survival at home impossible. Traditionally, there were always regions in Mexico where workers would travel to work in New York City or LA—this was a labour circuit—however, traditionally, this was a much smaller migration and most often the migration wasn’t permanent.

Mexican workers would travel to the US to work during the harvests and then travel back to Mexico to work, however given that the border has been so hardened and militarized today, the migration to the US tends to be much more permanent. [This was] exactly the opposite result to the expressed intentions from US officials on why the border with Mexico was hardened.

Displacement has spread throughout Mexico, as the inability to make a decent living is now impacting multiple regions as a result of such trade policies.

Christoff: In examining the impacts of free trade on peasant communities in Latin America, do you have reflections on the reactions from social movements in Peru and Colombia to the US push for bilateral accords with these two nations? Do you think that bilateral deals with the US will have similar results to regional trade accords in Latin America?

Carlsen: Many of the general tendencies that we see in NAFTA basically hold to bilateral agreements; there have been few substantial modifications.

Democrats in the US claim that the Peru agreement is a new model for trade agreements, given there are a couple of clauses concerning labour rights and public health. However, the agreement is still based on the same trade model.

Essentially this agreement—like NAFTA—is based on a forum of development in which a developing country opens up markets completely, while granting a whole series of privileges to foreign investors and [hoping] that economic development trickles down to weaker social sectors.

However, this economic model ensures that there is no trickle down, while a country loses the ability to maintain national development policies that also support the weakest in society.

Peru’s bilateral agreement with the US includes clauses for the privatization of social services, despite the fact that throughout Latin America, in other countries, privatization policies often lead to cutting off access to basic social services for the poorest.

So the key point is that these ‘free trade’ policies, in Central America, in Peru, in Mexico, equal increased inequality. Essentially, such trade agreements drive the gap between the rich and poor to grow.

Stefan Christoff is a journalist and community organizer. This interview was originally produced in audio format for the Fighting FTAs project, an international project that provides a global picture of free trade agreements (FTAs), and insight into struggles being waged by social movements fighting back.

Oaxacans stand up and fight back