Five reasons to oppose regional trade agreements
BY Jesse McLean
With thousands protesting the proposed Security and Prosperity Partnership, it’s easy to miss the fact that the provinces are also busy paving their own roads to massive deregulation. On April 28, the premiers of Alberta and British Columbia enacted the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA), which gives businesses seamless access to interprovincial trade. It also allows corporations to sue provincial governments for any measure they feel “restricts or impairs” their investment. In the east, there’s Atlantica, a proposed binational trading bloc that would integrate Canada’s easternmost provinces with parts of New England and upstate New York. Here are fi ve reasons to oppose these deals:
1 Loss of democracy
Forget for a moment that TILMA was enacted without any public consultation or legislative debate. Instead, look at who handles disputes between governments and corporations—an unelected tribunal that can rewrite democratically made laws by ruling that a current regulation impedes investment, or that it’s more restrictive than necessary. These types of tribunals have a history of siding with corporations: In the six cases brought to arbitrators under the Agreement on Internal Trade, enacted in 1995 to reduce trade barriers within Canada, the government lost every time.
2 Environmental damage
At the core of Atlantica is a massive transportation corridor that sends imported Asian goods and unrefi ned oil down Yankee-way. This is great news for the shipping industry, but bad news for the fi ght against global warming.
3 Decreased regulation
Under TILMA, provinces must “mutually recognize” each others’ existing standards, allowing businesses to choose which province’s regulations to operate under. So even if it doesn’t want to, a municipality in one province could have to weaken its environmental regulations to match that of its counterpart.
4 Attack on workers’ rights
Proponents of Atlantica, such as economic think tank Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, call for scrapping the minimum wage and denying workers the ability to organize. Another proponent of Atlantica is the federal government; it endorsed the agreement in the 2007 budget.
5 Integration with the U.S.
Currently, TILMA only involves Alberta and B.C., but the federal government has pushed for it to be adopted nationally. Having regulations harmonized across Canada would enable easier integration with the U.S.— several American businesses have already expressed an interest in expanding TILMA’s borders. Doing so would potentially give these companies the ability to challenge any Canadian law that impedes their investments.
