Limited criticism of TPP during Federal Election campaign

The three major parties, Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP basically support the huge Trans Pacific Partnership(TPP) trade deal even though auto parts companies and dairy producers have expressed concerns about it along with many other critics.

 

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Only the Green Party's Elizabeth May has directly opposed the TTP and is critical of other trade deals as well. A video summarizing some of the problems with the TPP from the Green Party website is appended. The situation with respect to the three major parties is summed up by Thomas Walkom in an article published back in August: Aside from some comments on the need to protect farmers and the need for more transparency during the negotiations, the Liberal party supports the TPP. Likewise, the NDP have also come out in favour of the TPP, only criticizing the Conservative negotiators and likewise emphasising the need to defend farmers. Substantive criticism of the TPP has largely been confined to groups such as the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Given the magnitude of the deal, this is insufficient.

Thomas Mulcair seems determined to show he is in favour of "free trade" and orthodox in his economic views. He says the NDP is "enthusiastically in favour" of the TPP but also expresses concern for protecting areas in the Canadian economy where there is supply management as in dairy farming. This is particularly significant in Quebec. Mulcair said:"Supply management is something that has allowed Canadian farming families to hold on to their farms, despite the ups and downs … and lots of those farmers are worried. We've met them in southern Ontario, we met them here in Quebec, and we're going to stand up strongly and defend every step of the way our supply management system."The auto sector is also concerned about what effect the TPP would have on it. Both the Liberals and the NDP have complained about the lack of transparency in the negotiations as well. However, they have come out overall in favour of the agreement without even talking about the huge problems in the agreement as a whole. The parties seem to worry most about specific interests that have some political clout such as dairy farmers, or the auto sector.

As Walkom points out, the TPP could have huge implications for the cost of prescription drugs, making them much more expensive and even sabotage provincial efforts to build a national pharmacare system. U.S. negotiators are reportedly demanding that pharmaceutical giants be given even greater protection for new drugs. The suggested rules would make it very expensive to produce generic versions of these drugs which otherwise would be much cheaper. Australia, which has a national pharmacare program, is very much opposed to these changes. We do not know what Canada's position is.

Advocates of the TPP note the huge trading area that Canada would have access to with 12 countries involved including the U.S., Australia, Mexico, Japan, and Malaysia among others. Some critics claim leaked rules show that domestic laws and regulations would need to conform to TPP rules. There is to be an investor-state settlement mechanism that could be used to "attack domestic public interest laws." These types of mechanisms exist in other international trade agreements. In 2013 Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz claimed that based on leaked drafts, the TPP agreement posed "grave risks" and "serves the interest of the wealthiest." It does so through serving the interests of huge global corporations, providing them with extended rights and limiting the power of democracies to pass laws that might conflict with their interests.Noam Chomsky said in 2014 that the TPP is "designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximise profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity." Further concerns about the TPP can be found at the Council of Canadians, and this Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives article.

New negotiations for TPP at Leesburg Virginia Sept 6 to Sept. 15

A recent negotiating round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership took place in Leesburg, Virginia from September 6th through to September 15th.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement being negotiated with a total of eleven different Pacific Rim countries up to now. The negotiations began with just four countries but new countries keep joining in. As of now the following countries are invovlved: Brunei, Chile, Singapore, New Zealand, U.S., Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, and Canada. The TPP is describe by Wikipedia as follows:

In 2007, negotiations began for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a significantly expanded version of the agreement, encompassing a larger group of countries. These ongoing negotiations have drawn criticism and protest from the public and elected officials, in part due to the secrecy of the negotiations and a number of controversial clauses in draft agreements leaked to the public. 'Of the 26 chapters under negotiation, only a few have to do directly with trade. The other chapters enshrine new rights and privileges for major corporations while weakening the power of nation states to oppose them.'[2]

On Sunday September 9 the United States Trade Representative's office held what it calls a Direct Stakeholder Engagement. The event is to allow various stakeholders to talk with negotiators one-on-one, to raise questions and share views.

There were dozens of groups represented at the 'stakeholder forum' including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce but also the Brotherhood of Teamsters. Almost 150 representatives of different interested groups gathered in a protest on a hillside after the stakeholder forum. They called for proposals being negotiated to be made public and chanted: "Flush the TPP"

Arthur Stamoulis of the Washington-based Citizens Trade Campaign who organized the protest said:“We want negotiators to release the text, to tell people what they’re proposing in our names."

Transparency has long been an issue. Many consumer, labor, environmental groups, and even some U.S. politicians want positions of participants to be made public. The TPP is supposed to be a model for future pacts. Obama hopes to double U.S. exports by 2014. However, many aspects of the negotiations concern issues other than trade especially intellectual property rights.

Sixty different groups made presentations at the forum with varying agendas from Friends of the Earth to the American Automotive Policy Council. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce along with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America asked that the agreement contain strong protections for copyrights and patents. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the negotiations:

“This free-trade agreement is central to America’s economic vision in Asia. By reducing market distortions and leveling the playing field, the TPP will raise the bar for competition in a way that benefits every economy in the region, whether it is an active partner in the TPP or not.”

Global capital will not need a world government to ensure there are global regulations that are in its own interest. These regulations can be achieved by free trade deals that will do an end run around national laws and regulations.