Rejecting TPP a Matter of Human Rights
Trade deal would put Canada in consort with nation plagued by trafficking, aggressive corps
Forget about the dairy farms and supply management. The real reasons Canada should withdraw from its unseemly flirtation with the Pacific Rim trade deal are that it would formalize a trade relationship with a country plagued by human rights abuses, and make local laws and regulations designed to protect health and the environment more easily struck down by multinational companies out to fatten their bottom lines.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a proposed deal between 12 nations. I believe Canada should withdraw from negotiations, but that is unlikely to happen given the three largest parties contesting this fall’s federal election haveexpressed some level of support for it, with NDP support the most ambiguous and Conservative the most enthusiastic. The Green party has joined the NDP in calling for public release of the draft deal before it is signed by Canada, and is the only significant Canadian party to explicitly oppose the deal.
We’ve been hearing a lot over the past few weeks about the TPP. Most of the mainstream media coverage has been obsessively focused on whether delegates from the 12 countries involved would be able to cut a deal at last minute negotiations in Hawaii. The big issues, we were told, were whether the Harper Conservatives would give away Canada’s traditional supply management arrangements for dairy products, and whether the other countries involved would yield to American pressure to re-write intellectual property laws to further enrich big U.S. based multinationals.
While these are both important issues, and arguably enough to suggest Canada should opt out, the combination of secrecy and distraction has meant that some other crucial matters have been ignored.
It is hard for anyone outside the secretive negotiations to assess these matters with any certainty, as details of the deal have yet to be made public.
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