I’m not claiming that Global Trade Watch is unbiased. They aren’t. But they’ve done the research. bernse seemed to be implying that the protestors couldn’t have any way of knowing what the effect of the FTAA would be, but anyone who takes the time (as Global Trade Watch has) can see what the effect of NAFTA has been, and make an informed decision based on that.
Crap. These people were involved in the decision-making process. It is called “elections”.
Um, that really doesn`t make that much of a difference if:
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you elect a government on the strength of their promise to repeal NAFTA, and they renege on their promise to do so, as Canadians did eight years ago when they first elected Chretien;
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your representatives are forbidden to see the draft text until after parliament recesses, and therefore no debate is held, as has taken place this past month.
As for protesters throwing rocks at the cops… As I just reported in my thread in MPSIMS, Ive been in the thick of things... close enough into the barricades to be quite overcome with tear gas. Total number of people Ive seen gassed: over a thousand. Total number of people I`ve seen throwing rocks at the (shielded) cops: four.
Lord, we certainly don’t want countries cooperating and working together. Things would be SO much better if they’d just keep to themselves and not cooperate on anything and never sign treaties or deals or trust one another at all. The world would be such a better place if everyone was strictly isolationist.
As for you RickJay, if youd ever read anything Ive ever written about the subject, you would know quite well that the problem is not globalization. We`ve had globalization since the sixteenth century. The problem is trade deals, such as the one being negotiated now, that destroy the power of governments to create legislation favouring the health and well-being of their citizens, in favour of the right of corporations to make profit unsubject to the same social contract to which all citizens are signatory.
Well anyway, it didn’t take the boys long to rip down the “wall of shame”. They had a block long section torn down just as Bush was getting off his plane. They worked upwind from the gas gunners.
How convenient of you to forget that there have been TWO federal elections since, both under the complete understanding NAFTA would not be repealed, and the Liberals were re-elected by substantial majorities. In fact, the last majority was the biggest they’ve had.
As for you, Matt, I challenge you to find a single treaty Canada has ever signed that surrenders our sovereign rights as a nation. You’re repeating alarmist bullshit. These are trade deals and nothing more; Canada could cancel them at any time, throw up the barriers, and do whatever the hell we pleased. We’d have to deal with the consequences of other countries being pissed off at us, but so be it. They can be pissed off if they want; it’s not our place to tell them what to do.
What about the FTAA specifically prohibits Canada from creating legislation favouring the health and well-being of its citizenry? Or what part of NAFTA, for that matter? Where is it written than Canada could not repeal these trade pacts if it chose? Where in these pacts does Canada subordinate its sovereign authority to any other state or federation of states?
No, they’ve crafted some propaganda. That page is hardly a coherent analysis.
Bah, I don’t have the time to thoroughly rip this apart but let me observe that their crafting of NAFTA facts is hardly worthy of the name analysis let alone research. E.g. attributing change in trade balance with Mexico to NAFTA per se: given the evolution of US trade balances in the last five years in general, driven by the economic expansion, one can hardly ipso facto attribute this to NAFTA. The entire page is filled with such sloppiness, or rather distortions.
Does not compute. NAFTA was enacted seven years ago. FTAA has not yet been written. What happened last month?
I was listening to NPR this morning, and the idiot commentator was repeating the crap about the FTAA talks being undemocractic because the leaders weren’t giving representatives of the protestors a place at the table.
What a load of bunk. The protesters are already represented at the table by their elected representatives. I don’t seem to recall protestors or interest groups being invited to the table during the negotiations for SALT II, START, etc. And I don’t remember anyone claiming they were “undemocratic”, at least on the U.S. side.
The remedy to an allegedly bad treaty, policy, what have you, is to throw the rascals out. As Rickjay pointed out, Canadians have twice re-elected the Liberals after they reneged on their promise to repeal NAFTA. If NAFTA was undemocratic and against the wishes of the Canadian people, the New Democrats would be running the country now. In the U.S., Pat Buchanan or H. Ross Perot would be President.
When both countries have rejected anti-NAFTA leadership, to call NAFTA (and, potentially, FTAA) undemocratic is arrogant. It recapitulates the arguments of elites everywhere - that they, rather than the common people, know what it best for the country. Your fellow countrymen have spoken, and, in the process, demonstrated much more intelligence than the protestors.
Sua
They’ve done the research. Those citations at the bottom of the page imply that someone looked them all up, both the government reports and the stuff from less objective sources. That’s research. Whether the conclusions they draw from that research are valid is a whole other issue.
As I tried to make clear to Captain Amazing, the point I was trying to make originally was that the protestors did not just wake up one morning and say “Trade? Gah! Trade BAD!!!”. The link to Global Trade Watch was to demonstrate that some of the protestors had spent a lot of time staring long and hard at the effects of NAFTA before they drew their conclusions about what the effects of an FTAA would be. Your opinion of their conclusions or even the objective truth of their conclusions doesn’t change that.
Feel free to “rip into” Global Trade Watch. I only cited them in particular because theirs was the first page I stumbled across with a good list of citations. I’m sure there are other protestors whose opinions (right or wrong) are just as well-informed.
No, they haven’t done the research. Valid research requires you to look at the relevant information and document your conclusions. GTW didn’t do that.
In the very first section, GTW documents U.S. jobs allegedly lost due to NAFTA. It then, quite remarkably, states that overall job growth in the U.S. during the same time period is “totally unrelated to NAFTA” without any citations. Now, if you were to write a college paper on the effects of NAFTA, and were to include that statement without support or citations, you would get an F.
It strikes me as somewhat important in determining whether NAFTA has resulted in a net gain or loss of U.S. jobs, that you research whether the massive increase in the number of jobs in the U.S. since the implementation of NAFTA was related to NAFTA.
Given this key unsupported statement (and I didn’t even bother to look for more, but I’m sure they are there), Cap’n Amazing’s judgment of propaganda is the correct one.
Sua
Sua, you have made a gross generalization. The last election in Canada in which free trade was a primary issue had a party opposed to it come to power, and that party has been re-elected to power twice since then without free trade being a primary issue. Quite simply, the present government was not elected with a clear mandate to broaden free trade, and if it were to be suggested that there was any mandate concerning free trade, then that mandate should be the one opposing free trade which it rode to power on the last time free trade was a primary election issue. As far as your comment about throwing the rascals out goes, they were. That’s how the present party came to power, and throwing the present party out during the last election was not in the cards for the only viable alternative was election of a party which offered far less assurance for the primary issue of protection of health care against the inroads of privatization, and also, although it was not an election issue, was heavily in support of free trade.
Most Canadians support free trade with other nations (71% according to MacLean’s year end survey). (And although I have no proof, I expect that most would like to the the poorer nations develop.) However, this must be placed within the perspective of the primary issue in the last election: protection of national health care. Quite simply, there is massive support for such protection, and the party which went on to win made strong assurances that the national health care system would be protected. There were also other issues including cultural protection and fresh water protection which were at issue at the last election, and which were promised protection by the party which went on to win.
There have been ongoing difficulties faced by the government in protecting health care, culture and water. Many people wanting such protection have become frustrated by the government’s hands being tied by international agreements, including GATT and NAFTA, and consequently want to remind the government that while they are not opposed to freer trade, the are unwilling to support free trade on all matters without restriction.
The government in turn has offered assurances, but has kept its cards so close to its chest that it is precluding Parliamentary debate on whatever it eventually commits the people to. Increasingly on other issues it has forced its back benchers to vote along party lines, suggesting that even if there were to be a debate on the particulars of a free trade agreement, such debate would not be full and fair. This flies in the face of what Canadians have come to expect of their Government, for voting is only the first step in the representative process. Being elected but then not being afforded the opportunity of Parliamentary debate on hugely important matters is fundamentally undemocratic. There is great concern in some quarters that if the Government is willing to side step the Parliamentary practice of debate necessary to responsible government, then it may well be willing to sell out Canadians on other matters, such as protection of health care, culture and water.
That is why many thousands of Canadians are making their presence felt at the conference. They are there to remind the Government that it must be accountable to the people, both inside Parliament, at international negotiations, and in the street among the people.
I strongly disagree that the people have been involved in the particulars of the free trade negotiations by virtue of their having elected on a different platform a government which is closed to Parliamentary debate. To assert that there is such a mandate is extremely simplistic, and I suggest your passion for the subject matter of free trade (which I have not commented on either way) is blinding you to extremely serious irregularities in the Canadian democratic process.
I submit that the assinine and dangerous behaviour of a very few violent protesters should not be confused with the massive concern the Canadian public has expressed in wanting its government to act responsibly in how it goes about considering, negotiating and ratifying a further free trade agreement.
There is a great deal of unsupportable misinformation floating about Canada concerning free trade, some of which you have correctly identified (particularly concerning the net effect of NAFTA on the economy), but I submit that the best way to address this problem is to open up the process and permit Parliament, as elected by the people, to do its job and fully and freely debate the matter before any major international obligations are incurred.
Canada has a long tradition of participatory democracy, including consultation, round tables, citizen advisory groups, inclusive delegations, and Parliamentary debate. Somehow this seems to have been passed over with this most recent round of free trade negotiations. Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, and regardless of whether free trade is good or bad in the long term, the process the Government has followed on this occasion is an affront to responsible government as it is usually practised in Canada, and has raised serious concerns as to whether the Government can be trusted to protect the primary areas of importance on which it had been elected. Thus tens of thousands of Canadians have turned to another long tradition of Canadian participatory democracy: direct protest.
…you’re one of those who backed the wrong horse in said elections.
Amazing that those whose electoral choices do not form a majority opinion immediately decry the result as ‘undemocratic’. This is the same argument used by those ‘spokespeople’ for protest groups who point to the few hundred people behind them as proof positive that the democratic process is a national failure.
“We do not agree = democracy has failed”
matt, I’m sorry to hear of the ignorant verbal assault you had to endure in Q.C.; I honestly think that I wouldn’t have as much fun if there weren’t as many choice NDP supporters in my immediate vicinity with whom I frequently debate.
However, I also live in a province where the NDP have been running the show for over a year now, and apart from spending a whole lotta money this provinvce doesn’t have to further their social agenda, there still hasn’t been any appreciable improvement in provincial healthcare. Now, I didn’t get asked when they decided to buy up a large privately-run clinic (where I once worked), but I wasn’t on the streets the next day hucking rocks at cop cars either.
Ya know what I did? I wrote my MLA a disapproving letter. And i got ignored the same way all those globalphobes in gasmasks do. But I know there’s another election coming someday, so I refrained from endagering the safety of world leaders and committing wanton property damage and just went back to work the next day.
Kudos to the two or three thousand protesters in Quebec on Saturday who held a peaceful demonstration and were afforded (by my stopwatch) the same media coverage as the rock-throwing morons at the barricades.
Uh-huh. Cigarette companies do research too.
This presupposes two things:
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Some other entity besides the electorate determines what the primary issues are. If the repeal of NAFTA were the primary issue of the electorate, it would become the primary issue in any election. The Liberals could assert all they want that a particular election isn’t about NAFTA, but if the electorate decides that it is, than it is;
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That “viable alternatives” are created by something other than the electorate. (BTW, I assume you are referring to Reform/Alliance.) Bullshit. In a democracy, the only reason a party isn’t a “viable alternative” is because the electorate doesn’t support it. If the Canadian electorate supported the position of the NDP, including opposition to NAFTA, than the NDP, not Reform, would have been the “viable alternative” in the last election. Hell, Reform didn’t exist 10 years ago; the way it became the “viable alternative” was to garner support for its positions.
It is my understanding of parliamentary forms of government that the ruling party strictly enforces party discipline on its members in Parliament. Given that a loss in Parliament is or is easily converted into a no-confidence vote, they have to. For example, to my knowledge the only “free vote” in Britain’s Parliament under Blair has been the one on fox hunting.
With or without debate, the MPs in Ottawa could have voted against NAFTA. They did not.
Again, did Parliament vote? There is your due process; if the elected representatives of the people vote on something, the Canadian democratic process has not been compromised. When the electorate twice re-elects a government that explicitly makes clear it has changed its mind and supports NAFTA, democracy is vindicated. If and when the Canadian electorate decides that it wants to get rid of NAFTA, they will elect a party that opposes NAFTA.
While I agree that it was at the least unseemly to prevent debate, were the members of Parliament denied the opportunity to cast an informed vote? I find that to be impossible; there was literally a flood of information, pro and con, on NAFTA in the media and on the internet.
Sua
Well, as Sua mentions, they really have not done “research” in the sense that I would mean it, they’re garnished pre-determined positions with some facts and glossed over any and everything inconvenient (much like race science researchers), as per their entirely unsupported assertion in re job growth, trade deficint (which does not even follow logically as a bad thing per se, nor a result of NAFTA). They are quite clearly cooking their books. I have ** no ** patience for this sort of thing.
There are economically valid critiques to be made of free trade and differential effects, but they are not making them in large part.
But Sua,
That was me.
Elections are not the only way people participate in the decision-making process. Other ways include lobbying, writing their representatives, and, yes, protesting.
Why you yelling at me? I was merely trying to provide the perspective of the protestors, mainly in response to RickJay’s claim that the protestors were isolationist. I’d say they are just as much anti-isolationist as those supporting the FTAA, just with a different perspective. I actually tend to agree with you on this issue that free trade is, on balance, a very good thing. I also realize that free trade has been used to justify exploitation and to evade regulations in the home country.
[quote]
When that textile plant closes down in Brazil because the owners decide they can’t make a profit while complying with the labor regulations you want, I am sure that the newly unemployed workers will send you all big “Thank You” cards for saving them from oppression. :rolleyes:
[quote]
As I said, I tend to agree with you that free trade can provide huge economic benefits to everyone, but particularly the “less developed” countries. At the same time, there are clearly potential pitfalls that need to be addressed. For example, there need to be some basic agreement on minimum regulations regarding things like pollution and child labor (just to name two obvious ones). Otherwise, we’re just transfering problems from one country to another. As I pointed out in my previous post, I’m not familar enough with the details of the FTAA to say how it handles these types of issues.
Damn posters who hit Submit instead of Preview
JeffB -
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Absolutely, lobbying and protesting are part of the democratic process. Disregarding the rock throwers, I have no problem with what’s happening in Quebec City (although I obviously have problems with their cause). What pisses me off about the rhetoric in Canada is that a vote in Parliament and national elections are being viewed and somehow illegitimate and “undemocratic” because the result wasn’t what some people wanted.
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The “moronic brethren” comment wasn’t directed at you.
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Just to throw things off on a wild tangent, and to invite more scorn, regulations concerning child labor is not an obvious issue demanding regulation, if by regulation you mean prohibition. We in the West should not demand an end to child labor if the result is family starvation.
Sua
You must be referring to Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservative party winning election over Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals in Sir John A’s second run, since that would be the last time a party opposed to free trade has won a free-trade-oriented election.
To state that the 1993 election had free trade as a primary issue is simply false. It was a secondary issue, at best, in a wide range of Liberal promises, the most popular and hyped of which was unquestionably the (broken) promise to repeal the GST. Ask Sheila Copps.
In a Westminster system, a government recieves a “mandate” to govern. The Liberals have been given the mandate three times now to govern as they see fit within the confines of the law. There’s no way you can give the government a “mandate” to do a number of particular things and expect that to hold up over four years; in our system they are given a broad mandate to GOVERN, not to do a particular thing. The Canadian electorate has enthusiastically endorsed the Liberals’ governance. Three times. And everyone knows they’re free-trade-friendly. Hell, most of us knew it in 1993, too.
That’s a complete crock. The government’s not the slightest bit restricted by GATT or NAFTA in protecting health care or water, and “culture” is a pretty nebulous concept but they still seem to wield awesome power in that regard, too, unless you’re telling me the CRTC is secretly taking its orders from Washington. (If split-run magazines is the worst thing we can complain about, there’s no problem.) Nothing about any trade deal we have signed prevents Ottawa from funding health care to whatever degree it sees fit and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. Health care is suffering because the federal and provincial governments are fighting over dollars.
As to “protecting water,” I was unaware that NAFTA forced Canada to redirect the Mackenzie to California, but maybe I missed that clause. I realize that many people would like to see fresh water exports banned (a remarkably miserly stance for a nation that has .5% of the world’s population and the better part of its fresh water) but Canada’s quite entitled to do so; whether it does or not is not a NAFTA issue.
There is, as of yet, nothing to debate. Going into this conference, there was no deal. The deal has to be signed and THEN ratified.
If the Liberals were to cut short Parliamentary debate on the matter, that would be a bad thing. It does not, however, go to explaining why the FTAA is bad; it’s a political (Parliamentary, actually) issue, a separate matter. And I don’t believe for an instant that the people demonstrating in Quebec City are demonstrating against matters of parliamentary procedure.
That’s a point. Perhaps the link I chose wasn’t the best example I could have found. (It certainly seems my original post would have been better without it, anyway.)
Oh well. At least matt_mcl is all right.
Sigh…I shouldn’t get sucked in after being burned once already, but the fresh water thing is related to NAFTA somewhat. As I recall, one of the suits filed under NAFTA’s “investor protection” clauses related to the sale of fresh water from British Columbia. If anyone’s interested, I’ll see if I can find a cite tomorrow.
By regulation I mean regulation, not prohibition. Even in a wealthy country like the U.S., child labor has its place. Otherwise, I think we’re pretty much in agreement.
[
Sigh…I shouldn’t get sucked in after being burned once already, but the fresh water thing is related to NAFTA somewhat. As I recall, one of the suits filed under NAFTA’s “investor protection” clauses related to the sale of fresh water from British Columbia. If anyone’s interested, I’ll see if I can find a cite tomorrow. **
[/QUOTE]
Ah yes, Chapter 11. Had to come up sooner or later.
Chapter 11 of NAFTA prohibits member countries from treating investors of any of the member countries differently. This chapter strictly bans discrimination based on nationality within the countries in the agreement. It does nothing else. For example, if Smith Water Inc. of British Columbia was allowed to export water to the USA,. but Brown Water Ltd. of Arizona was not, there would be a chapter 11 case to be made. It also prohibits weasel methods of doing the same thing like demanding that an investor put local citizens on the board of directors (paragraph 4(a)) or force them to sell off their assets based on their nationality (4(b)) or have a certain level of domestic content (1106 1.(a)).
However, if Canada were to ban ALL water exports, no problem. As long as they ban everyone (everyone in the agreement; we can screw Japan all we want) there’s no Chapter 11 violation.
Here’s what Chapter 11 DOESN’T do:
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It does not in any way restrict the members from setting labour laws, minimum wages, or emlpoyment benefits of any kind, providing all investors are treated equally.
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It does not in any way restrict the members from setting health, safety, or environmental law, as long as all investors are treated equally. (See 1106 (2) and 1114) In fact, it specifically says the members shouldn’t do that (1115)
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It does not apply to ANY existing laws or measures that were in existence when NAFTA came into being.
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It does not in any way restrict governments from doing their OWN purchasing of goods and services from their own companies; so Canada’s government can buy exclusively Canadian when they go shopping for office chairs or tanks or whatever.
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It very specifically does not exclude investors from existing law.
So RickyJay, how did California discriminate against Canada by banning MTBE additives from gasoline?