The Trans-Pacific Partnership signed by International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland in February has been called “the biggest trade deal Canadians have never heard of.” Angus Reid polls consistently reveal that about 50 per cent of Canadians have no opinion on the TPP, while a steady 30 per cent favour and 20 per cent oppose the deal. Recently, some increase in the opposition has been recorded, probably because the text of this most untransparent of deals has been released and public interest groups have begun to decode its contents.
The irrepressible Jim Hightower says, “20 years later, the corporate gang that stuck us with NAFTA is back, hoping to fool us with an even more destructive multinational deal.” Several U.S. economics professors concede that import competition from low-wage countries contributed to momentous decline in U.S. manufacturing employment, but acknowledge that those jobs are not coming back.
Canada has lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs since Jean Chrétien’s NAFTA deal. A Toronto report found that 20 per cent of people in and around that city are now employed in precarious, unstable or part-time jobs. This type of employment has increased by 50 per cent in the past 20 years since NAFTA was signed. In this same period, not a single notable social program has been introduced or expanded.
Manica Balasegaram, spokesperson for Médecins Sans Frontières, says, “Despite repeated warnings … U.S. negotiators have pushed for provisions that benefit pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the more than 800 million people who need access to affordable generic medicines in current TPP countries.”
Of the TPP’s 30 chapters, only six deal with actual trade issues, which is why Bill Moyers says, “TPP is a corporate-investor rights agreement, not a trade agreement,” and Paul Krugman agrees: ”this is not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharmaceutical companies and firms that want to sue governments.” Public Citizen executive director Lori Wallach calls the deal a “corporate coup d’état.”
The Canadian dairy and poultry industries are controlled by boards which manage product supplies to match consumer demand, giving some security to established producers but the U.S. will continue to subsidize its equivalent industries with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
On Friday (April 8) at 7 p.m. at Bowen Park, the Council of Canadians is presenting three experts to discuss the TPP: veterinary scientist Shiv Chopra, sacked by Health Canada for resisting pressure to approve Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone; filmmaker Paul Manly on investor state resolution (a corporate attack on tax money by suing governments for estimated lost profits); and Brenda Sayers, Hupacasath leader of the legal challenge to the Canada-China trade deal.
This is our opportunity to develop informed opinions. We have until the end of April to tell the minister that corporate profits do not trump national and planetary interests.
Marjorie Stewart is past-chairwoman of the Nanaimo Foodshare Society. She can be reached at marjorieandalstewart@shaw.ca.