New Free Trade Deal: Canada trade supply management to join "Trans-Pacific Partnership"
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/13/canada-wants-to-join-u-s-and-asi...
"HONOLULU — Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Sunday Canada will apply to join a new free trade agreement with the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, and suggested that Canada’s farm supply management systems could be on the table for negotiation."
"A handful of countries in the TPP negotiations — including possibly New Zealand and the United States — have been resisting Canada’s entry into the group because of the Canadian supply management system that protects fewer than 20,000 dairy and poultry farmers behind a tariff wall and hands them production quotas."
This is exactly what people supporting the Wheat Board have been saying. Now harper has his sights set on the dairy/poultry side of things.
The funny thing i found in this article is that the line we're usually given is that supply management causes prices to remain artificially high. here it says "The Prime Minister said Canada can “easily meet” the broad strokes of the agreement unveiled Saturday by Mr. Obama, even if it means throwing into the mix a supply management system that forces Canadians to pay higher prices for products like milk, cheese, chicken and eggs."
in other words, he wants us to pay more for basic necessities when people are struggling so that a few huge companies can make a nice profit. A nice example of hyper destructive capitalism at it's best.
He's going to destroy everything in order to sell oil. All other economic that alberta oil can be sacrifice.
I wonder why other province vote for him, it so ovious that it was his plan all alone.
In the end, the 1% are going to eat the 99%.
Canada and Mexico to Join US In NAFTA Of the Pacific - by Dana Gabriel
http://mostlywater.org/node/122036
"John Weekes, Canada's chief NAFTA negotiator, said Ottawa can't afford to be left out of talks that appear to be offering signatories a deeper economic relationship with the US than can be found in the North American free-trade agreement.' Weeks is also quoted as saying,
'What we're talking about here - if it really does become what Obama says it will be - is we're renegotiating NAFRA in the same way we renegotiated the Canada - US FTA...
The article, TPP as a Lynchpin of US Anti-China Strategy by Jane Kelsey sheds more light as to the real agenda behind the proposed trade agreement..."
TPP: New World Order Blue Print (and vid)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/New-World-Order-Blueprint-by-Rudy-Avizi...
"On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter for the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP) was made public. This agreement has been framed as a 'free trade' agreement and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with free trade. The other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting governments and protective regulations.
If completed, this agreement will hard code corporate dominance over sovereign governments into international law that will supercede any federal, state or local laws of any member country.."
This is another critical issue largely unnoticed and unremarked in the MSM.
*Please forward and circulate widely*
Good points. It is really a more complicated area of policy than it first looks. There is certainly a progressive argument to be made against supply management in that it advantages relatively wealthy farmers at the cost, in part, of poor consumers. Animal welfare and food quality do not necessarily require supply management (and in some cases, supply management currently gets in the way of farmers trying to produce organic or just different poultry, or adding meat or dairy to CSA programs - decent paper on it here) and could be achieved by regulation. Sadly - life isn't quite that simple as saying all will be well if we just dismantle supply management and we also have to consider the institutions regulating (or not) international trade. So very much depends on the details. Depending on what we sign, Canada might have to accept other countries' agricultural regulations as being substantially identical to our own, even if they aren't. As a matter of national food security we might find it worth paying a premium on domestic products rather than being dependent on international trade. There is no guarantee that lower prices paid by industrial consumers of milk, poultry or eggs will necessarily find their way through to final consumers unless there is adequate competition present.
I don't think supply management should be so much as a political sacred cow as it often is but I realize that messing with it too quickly and without a plan could have some very bad results.
Canadians would see Internet freedoms curtailed under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being negotiated among a dozen Pacific Rim countries, groups critical of the deal say
Martha Hall Findlay is on P&P weekly, and she sounds really, really conservative now - her argument against keeping 'supply management' was one of the most right-wing arguments I've heard in weeks. Can't remember exactly what the substance of her argument was, but I recall when I heard it being quite taken aback. The panel that followed (including Ian Capstick) shot her ideas down.
ETA:
Martha Hall Findlay: Politicians need courage to dismantle supply management
I like this comment following the article:
"Prices would initially come down, then rise up again, that's how the market has worked for decades. Why the hell does it take 'courage' to side with the top money people, that's ridiculous. You don't dismantle and give away control over our food supply while in the midst of climate change in the name of free trade. A review is in order to see if there is something salvageable. After a dismantling who would our farmers actually be working for?"
(cross-posted to Liberal leadership thread)
Someone on P&P said dismantling supply management is right up there with dismantling the Canadian Wheat Board.
(cross-posted from Liberal leadership thread)NDP: Supply management is fair to farmers, good for economy
excerpt:
Conservatives have put Canada's supply management on the table in trade talks - and now we see some Liberals openly opposing our supply managed sectors, according to NDP International Trade Critic Don Davies.
"New Democrats have a clear and strong policy: Canada's supply managed sectors provide clear benefits to Canadians and will not be compromised, in trade talks or otherwise", insisted Davies.
He pointed out that supply management in Canada's dairy, poultry and egg industries is a tested system for efficient delivery of safe, local food to Canadians. Davies said that, unlike other countries who subsidize their producers, Canada's supply management policy doesn't cost taxpayers a cent.
NDP Agriculture Critic Malcolm Allen added his concerns of what any concessions could mean for these important industries. "By putting supply management in the cross hairs of these negotiations, the Conservative government is attacking the livelihood of dairy, poultry and egg farmers right across the country; farmers who expect this government to live up to its word."
Canada's Humiliating Entry into TPP Trade Deal
Where is M. Spector? I'd like to ask him why he believes Canada is a standalone imperialist nation. It's clearly untrue. We are bullied and pushed around time and time again by the imperialist master nation next door. We have no government in Ottawa. They are mere colonial administrators and bought and paid-for hirelings of the corporatocracy.
But it would be different under the NDP.
It took uberrich Americans decades to scoop-up thousands of Canadian crowns and valuable assets. In the same way that a person with poor dental hygene shouldn't wonder why he is toothless one day, the stoogery in Ottawa didn't happen overnight. The NDP can't undo in four years what took decades for the corporatocracy to do unto Canada. The decay and rot in Ottawa has been there for a long time.
Mulcair is not Jesus. There will be no instant miracles. And I think that de-colonizing Canada will require something like a 12-step program. We need PR and a united front on the left. ie. modern democracy. The plutocracy will take some undoing for sure.
Oh, I agree. I think the NDP can do some small things like overturning some of the Harper cuts, but reversing the damage of the past 100+ years is well nigh impossible. There's the national accumulated debt to deal with, too. I'd love to see Mulcair try to eliminate the debt by saying it doesn't exist, and just carry on. As for the F35s, I have no idea what PM Mulcair will do with that shitty deal.
I think a lot of us are hoping that a federal NDP government might be able to restore spending to 1990s levels. There were massive cuts beginning in 1995. In Ontario it started with Mulroney short-changing the province by $4 billion. Neoliberalism is economic shrinkage and austerity. Debt repayment is made worse with austerity, and which is actually their plan all along. Neoliberalism is bad central planning gone awry.