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Secret draft of Canada-European Union free trade agreement
Trade Justice Network
2010-04-23, Issue 478
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/63916
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As Canadian and European trade negotiators gather in Ottawa for a third round of free trade negotiations, the newly formed Trade Justice Network has publicly released a draft text of the proposed Canada-European Union Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The network is raising serious concerns about the agreement’s potential impact on public and environmental policy, culture, farmers and public services in both Canada and Europe, and has issued a set of demands that it says must be met before negotiations are allowed to continue.
MEDIA RELEASE
For Immediate Release
April 19, 2010
Trade Justice Network releases secret draft of Canada-European Union free trade agreement, makes demands of Canadian and European governments
Ottawa – As Canadian and European trade negotiators gather in Ottawa for a third round of free trade negotiations, the newly formed Trade Justice Network today publicly released a draft text of the proposed Canada-European Union Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The network is raising serious concerns about the agreement’s potential impact on public and environmental policy, culture, farmers and public services in both Canada and Europe, and has issued a set of demands that it says must be met before negotiations are allowed to continue.
“The Harper government’s NAFTA-plus experiment with Europe is embarrassingly short-sighted in a world crying out for new answers to the social, economic and climate crises of our time,” says Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians, one of several environmental, labour, farmers’, cultural and social justice organizations which make up the new Trade Justice Network. “If only the Canadian and European negotiators were talking about creating a zone of high standards based on the precautionary principle, and of strengthened social protections. Unfortunately, the text we’re releasing today proves this deal is just another attempt to deregulate and privatize on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The CETA has been called the most significant bilateral trade negotiation since NAFTA and the first to involve the provinces in negotiations. Controversial provisions in the draft text would open Canada’s telecommunications sector to full foreign ownership, stop municipal governments from implementing local or ethical procurement strategies, (as with NAFTA. Pat) and require a burdensome necessity test for prudential financial or banking measures designed to protect countries and consumers for the kinds of crashes we saw globally in 2008. The text also presents a direct attack on Ontario’s Green Energy Act, and it would virtually eliminate the rights of farmers to save, reuse and sell seed, providing biotech, pharmaceutical, pesticide, seed and grain companies powerful new tools to essentially decide who should farm and how.
Canadian negotiators have also included a controversial investor-state dispute mechanism like the one in NAFTA. The Chapter 11 dispute process has allowed and encouraged large multinationals to sue North American governments for compensation against public health and environmental policies that limit corporate profits. “Europeans know Canada as a climate criminal thanks to Harper’s mockery of the UN climate talks and shockingly weak commitments in Obama’s voluntary Copenhagen Accord. Now we’re offering them an expensive and damaging investment protection pact that could help bring their own climate and environmental commitments down to our sad level,” says Trew.
The Trade Justice Network presented a list of demands that must be met before Canada-European Union trade negotiations are allowed to continue any further. These include: a comprehensive impact assessment of the deal’s potential impact on the jobs, poverty, gender, human rights, farmers, culture and the environment; a fundamental protection for public services and expansion of social policy; protection for the right to use public procurement as an economic development tool, and of the right to regulate in the public interest based on the precautionary principle; a commitment to strengthen labour and environmental protections and make them as binding, if not more binding, than investor guarantees, and; a recognition of the primacy of Indigenous Rights over corporate rights in Indigenous lands, territories and waters.
[Our negotiators did all of this for the EPA, right? Norman, I know many of you presented similar cases]
The Trade Justice Network will hold a series of public forums over the course of the week to raise more questions about the proposed trade deal while official negotiations are taking place in Ottawa. Forums are scheduled to take place in Ottawa (April 19), Montreal (April 20) and Toronto (April 21), with guest speakers from Europe participating by Skype and through video presentations. For more information on the public forums (times and locations), or to learn more about the Trade Justice Network, and to read the civil society declaration on the CETA, visit: www.tradejustice.ca and www.canadians.org/CETA
A full copy of the consolidated draft negotiating text has been posted on the Trade Justice Network website