Civic Election Day in Alberta today - have y’all voted yet? 
ETA: All the Alberta Dopers, that is.
Well, I’m not an Albertan, but there is a certain guy who I hope gets elected as Calgary’s mayor… 
I still haven’t figured out how to vote in my own municipal elections next month. Or I might go to an advance poll.
Tell me, straight up, why I as a Canadian should give a crap about a cheese producer who is so incompetent that they can’t compete with European cheese producers when given access to a market fifteen times larger than the Canadian market.
Too bad, so sad. Business is hard. If you want to run a successful business, make a better product or market it better or something.
Canadians businesses did just fine with the FTA with the United States. The same utterly ridiculous arguments were made against FTA as are being made now, and they were all wrong. All of them. The free trade agreement was insanely successful; in terms of helping Canadians, it is probably the single most positive government policy of any kind of Canada n the last quarter of a century. None of the people who predicted doom and gloom them have much to say now, and yet all of a sudden THIS free trade pact is going to be horrible for… the poor cheese producers?
(And seriously, you’re worried about bottled water coming out of our aquifers? Really? Most bottled water comes out of the tap. Don’t believe the hype. In any case, the amount of bottled water that actually comes from aquifers is a miniscule amount as compared to the volume of groundwater.)
Speaking of cheese, looks like we can make 1st class world quality product.
Cheese and poets, eh? We could be known for worse things. 
From the article:
Well, who wouldn’t?!? I need to try some Laankaster cheese now!
I expect that the terms will be written to protect against bulk water withdrawals, so as to prevent the USA from going through the Europeans to make an end run around the North American Free Trade Agreement. I don’t want to reduce the water level of the Great Lakes (and thereby incur a significant decrease in shipping and a significant increase in municipal water costs, plus environment harm) the would result in Superior water being diverted to the Great Plains.
I regularly buy cheese but sheepishly admit that I don’t know where it’s from. :rolleyes:
I certainly have! Around 9 this morning, there was one other person voting at the same time I was at the polling station I went to.
I was initially planning to vote for Diotte (I’m in Edmonton), but although I still think he has a good platform I do NOT like his attitude and I think attitude is also important in a mayor. So, I decided Iveson had a sufficiently good platform and is a much better diplomat and so I voted for him.
Just got back from voting. Lots of people at the voting station–nice to see a good turnout!
Assuming that the Canadian cheese producer doesn’t have to use artificially-expensive Canadian milk you probably shouldn’t.
The Canadian dairy quota system makes milk, and therefore cheese, more expensive than is should be. Either the cheese producer is going to be uncompetitively expensive or the dairy industry is going to have to accept higher/eliminated quotas to lower milk prices.
If this trade deal forces the government to stop keeping the price of milk or other agricultural products high I’d call it a win.
We voted in the advance polls this year, and I don’t know why we haven’t done that before! We walked in, were the only voters in there, voted, walked out - it took a very few minutes.
A gentleman by the name of Claude Gilbert, or more correctly, his sheep.
I’m curious, but do people actually believe it is possible to lower the level of the Great Lakes with bottled water, or is this a joke?
If every single drop of water consumed from bottled water in the United States was taken out of Lake Superior, Superior’s water level would drop by about a sixteenth of an inch. Maybe.
Glad to see that my golf buddy was re-elected to City Council. (Amazing how much I learn about city politics from playing golf.) Unsure how the rest of council will stack up, but I guess we’ll see.
I’m glad to see that Nenshi was re-elected. I harbour fears that Ford will be re-elected in Toronto as well.
I’m also happy that Nenshi was re-elected. It was nice to wake up to some positive news. Positive for those who like him, anyway.
Bottled water, no. Bulk water, yes - a very big concern for Ontario and the Great Lake states in the USA. Thus the need to ensure that any trade agreement is written tightly enough to ensure that the former is permitted but the latter is prohibited, rather than an overly broad term that removes water restriction.
This is the specific case I have in mind when I say I’m concerned about what bottled water suppliers have been given - Nestle’s Guelph-area water permit to get environmental review. Yes, they are filling water bottles from the ground-water aquifer. Yes, they are fighting restrictions that would have had them reduce their water consumption by 10% in a Level 1 drought, and 20% in a Level 2 drought.
And this is a prime example of what concerns me in free trade agreements - why should Nestle be exempted from water restrictions in times of drought when all the farmers in that area are on water rations and aren’t allowed to irrigate their crops?
Your example is a provincial permit granted to Nestle. Which begs the question: Does Free Trade override provincial control over resources?
For the rather obvious reason that the amount of water Nestle could possibly use to bottle water is a tiny, tiny fraction of the water used by farmers to irrigate crops.