International trade agreements aren’t typical fare for municipal councils. Woolwich and Wellesley, then, were on unfamiliar ground this week with a call to action on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), currently in the negotiation stage between Canada the European Union.
Following a presentation by Steve Sachs of the Waterloo Region Labour Council who was in Woolwich Monday and Wellesley Tuesday, councillors were asked to join some 40 other Canadian municipalities that have called on their provincial governments to keep municipalities from CETA’s grasp. What’s at stake is municipal autonomy in purchasing decisions, as well as yet another threat to local drinking water systems.
Wellesley councillors immediately backed the request, while their Woolwich counterparts were looking for more information before deciding.
As Sachs notes in his presentation, as the deal now stands, municipalities would lose some of their ability to control who bids on contracts for goods and services – CETA would open the process to international companies, disallowing any buy-local provisions.
Far more worrying is the access-by-stealth aspects of the deal: European designs on Canada’s resources, including water.
The Council of Canadians, working with leaked documents from the trade negotiations, reports that Canada and the provinces have failed to protect drinking water and wastewater services from trade rules that would encourage and lock in privatization.
The documents, made public in January, show Canada’s initial services and investment offers to the EU in ongoing CETA negotiations. They list policy areas or sectors that are to be spared from liberalization, which can be understood as deregulation or re-regulation on market-based terms favourable to multinational investment. Water services are not on the list, which means they are automatically included in the deal.
“The two biggest private water utilities in the world are European and eager to use CETA to gain access to Canada’s still public water systems,” says Maude Barlow, national chairperson with the Council of Canadians. “Harper’s message to these companies is that Canada is ‘open for business’ when it comes to water privatization. The very notion of water as a public good and a human right is at stake.
“CETA will open up the rules, standards and public spending priorities of provinces and municipalities to direct competition and challenge from European corporations,” she adds. “Europe is seeking a comprehensive and aggressive global
approach to acquiring the raw materials needed by its corporations. At its heart, this deal is a bid for unprecedented and uncontrolled European access to Canadian resources.”
Other groups see equally damning consequences of this trade deal, compounding the ill-effects of those already in place.
The Centre for Civic Governance, for instance, reports CETA posts a threat to local economies. Economist Jim Stanford found that CETA would create a huge trade deficit for Canada, resulting in the loss of up to 150,000 Canadian jobs.
CETA would give big European drug companies extended patent rights, resulting in massive cost in-creases for Canadian drug plans, including $1.3-billion per year on taxpayer-funded public drug plans and $1.5-billion on private drug plans.
Hydro Quebec’s Research Institute warns that CETA’s procurement chapter could limit the ability of government agencies to use public spending to achieve goals such as economic development and regional employment. If CETA had been in place in 2003, Quebec would likely not have been able to insist on 60 per cent provincial content in wind projects. Local content requirements under Ontario’s Clean Energy Act could face similar problems under CETA.
Even the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the national organization that represents municipalities such as Woolwich, has reservations about this deal, though it does generally support free trade, which is reason enough for the township not to rely on the FCM to make wise policy decisions in this regard.
The FCM estimates that Canadian municipal governments collectively purchase more than $98 billion per year in goods and services. By opening up this sector to foreign corporations, the CETA would make it harder to keep these dollars circulating in Canada’s local, regional and national economies.
The FCM supports maintaining local autonomy, but does back the free trade agreement, which purports to boost trade to Europe by 20 per cent and create 80,000 jobs. The reality, of course, will be otherwise, as other trade deals have served only to weaken the middle class.
Trade agreements have failed Canadians time and time again, yet we’re moving into another one – quietly, as is usually the case, so as not to draw attention to the process. NAFTA in particular has been hugely detrimental to the middle class in Canada and the U.S., while even further eroding Mexico’s economy.
It can be argued that liberalized monetary policies and trade deals that favour corporate interests over the well-being of citizens – policies that have eroded our standard of living for three decades – culminated in the recent financial meltdown. The cure, we’re told, is yet more deregulation and globalization, essentially offering a drowning man more water instead of a lifejacket.
Woolwich councillors say they want more information before taking a stand on the CETA talks. Research will show them there’s only one conclusion to be made.
