Easier said than done

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 5:36 PM - 70 Comments

The enduring riddle of opinion polling and the relationship between what people say they want and what people actually want is perhaps best captured by this bit from a new Environics poll commissioned by the Council of Canadians.

71% of Canadians strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement: “The money spent on wars and the military would all be better spent on efforts that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of climate change.”

Dan Gardner mocks. The necessary follow-up would be this: Do you agree that all the money in the defence department should be shifted to environment?

Canada-EU trade: And suddenly it was Christmas for policy geeks

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 67 Comments

A coalition of the usual suspects groups dedicated to defending the rights of workers and the downtrodden have this morning released very nearly the entire draft negotiating text of a proposed Canada-EU trade and investment agreement.

Coool.

They’ve sliced it up into more digestible chunks and posted them here at www.tradejustice.ca, where I’ve just become the first person to download all the documents and start reading them. The groups — Council of Canadians, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, National Farmers Union, Sierra Club Canada, Canadian Conference of the Arts — just held a news conference on the Hill and are promising a sustained campaign against the so-called CETA (Canada-EU Economic and Trade Agreement) in the weeks ahead. In the language of these groups:

The Canada-E.U. Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement negotiations are based on commitments to place corporate profit and power before social and economic justice, democratic control, and ecological sustainability. Negotiations are progressing quickly and with little public scrutiny until now.

The Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement is being negotiated as a “next-generation” free trade deal that goes beyond NAFTA and the WTO in shielding corporate activity from government controls. The draft agreement includes extensive chapters on services and investment, government procurement, intellectual property, and standards and regulations. It will also contain a controversial NAFTA-like investor-state dispute process that allows corporations from Europe to directly challenge and sometimes overturn Canadian laws that interfere with profits – even for public health or environmental reasons.

This campaign was always going to happen. It’s in the nature of the sweeping changes the EU negotiators are seeking (with Canadian negotiators seeking similar enhanced access to European markets, while trying to parry the European advances). For background, here’s a late-2008 post that sums up everything I’d written on Canada-EU trade talks up to that point; and a piece from last summer as the first intensive negotiations approached.

I’m seeking comment from European member states and the European Commission, as well as from Canadian advocates of a CETA (and, just because I enjoy smacking my head against a wall, from the Government of Canada too). I’ll let you know, here or in the magazine, what I find. Advocates of enhanced Canada-EU trade have preferred to low-bridge the whole process since negotiations began. I believe that option just evaporated.

The crossroads of international trade

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 11:27 PM - 60 Comments

I’m sorry, but this is huge. Huger than huge. Hugeastic. Hugeriffic.

Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada’s economy with the 27 nations of the European Union, with preliminary talks to be launched at an Oct. 17 summit in Montreal three days after the federal election.

Trade Minister Michael Fortier and his staff have been engaged for the past two months with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and the representatives of European governments in an effort to begin what a senior EU official involved in the talks described in an interview yesterday as “deep economic integration negotiations.”

If successful, Canada would be the first developed nation to have open trade relations with the EU, which has completely open borders between its members but imposes steep trade and investment barriers on outsiders…

A pact with the United States would be politically impossible in Europe, senior European Commission officials said.

Understand what this means. If we pull this off, then Canada would be the only developed country (Mexico has its own deal) with guaranteed access to both the European Union and the United States — the two richest markets in the world, with 800 million consumers between them. Locating in either the US or the EU would give a firm guaranteed access to only one. Only by locating in Canada would they get both.

It also brings with it the usual benefits of free trade, notably cheaper prices and greater selection for consumers. And this:

The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA by encompassing not only unrestricted trade in goods, services and investment and the removal of tariffs, but also the free movement of skilled people and an open market in government services and procurement – which would require that Canadian governments allow European companies to bid as equals on government contracts for both goods and services and end the favouring of local or national providers of public-sector services.

But it’s the strategic advantages that are so compelling. Now imagine that we also sign a free-trade agreement with India (or Japan), as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, among others, have recently advocated. We would stand at the crossroads of international trade and investment.

And if other countries should join us? So much the better. We lose our initlal strategic advantage as the unique point of intersection. But we gain from having more trading partners — and we have the pleasure of knowing that we’ve helped to propel the world closer to the ideal of universal freedom of trade. 

Now that’s a vision I can get behind. Continue…