TILMA – The Key to the North American Union
Presentation to the Standing Committee on the Economy
June 12, 2007 by Elaine Hughes, Archerwill, SK
First, let me say ”Thank You” to Premier Calvert and the NDP Government for giving the Saskatchewan people the opportunity to make presentations to this Committee on TILMA. The process itself supports the basic, fundamental idea of democracy – a scarce commodity in this country at the moment! I believe that TILMA is pivotal to saving our country and, if we want our country to stand, we must oppose Saskatchewan signing on to this ‘bad deal’, and we must do it now.
When I first heard about TILMA, it appeared to be just a piece of local ‘politics’ happening in BC and Alberta - Canada’s Constitution still does give provinces the ability to make regulations based on their local needs and should not be seen as trade barriers! However, the real implications behind this backroom deal have become alarmingly clear, especially since reading the leaked document entitled the North American Future 2025 Project…the ‘blueprint’ of Canada’s deep integration with the U.S. and Mexico.
Under the title North American Future 2025 Project, the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in collaboration with the Conference Board of Canada and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), is currently holding a series of “closed-door roundtable sessions” with government “practitioners” and private sector “stakeholders” in order to “strengthen the capacity of Canadian, U.S., and Mexican administration officials and that of their respective legislatures to analyze, comprehend, and anticipate North American integration”
Despite a lack of public awareness or input, all three North American governments are moving quickly toward a continental resource pact, North American security perimeter, and common agricultural and other polices related to our health and environment. Many working groups comprised of bureaucrats and corporate leaders are quietly putting this “partnership” into action, and to date only industry “stakeholders” have been consulted.
Chapter 5 of "Budget 2007" states that the Harper government is "Committing to work with interested provinces/territories to examine how the Alberta-British Columbia Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement could be applied more broadly. This will help build our economic union and promote the free flow of people and goods within Canada...Artificial barriers to labour mobility can make it difficult for firms to find the skilled labour they need. Other impediments to internal trade can raise business costs and reduce competition. The federal government is committed to building on (the) momentum (of TILMA) and will work with interested provinces and territories to examine how the TILMA provisions could be applied more broadly to reduce interprovincial barriers to trade and labour mobility across the country."
As reported in a June 6, 2007 Canadian Press article on CBC.ca (as well as the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the London Free Press and other newspapers), "The federal government is poised to tell the provinces that they must...mutually recognize a worker's occupational qualifications by default if they can't reconcile differences by April 1, 2009. It includes a binding dispute settlement mechanism and penalties of up to $5 million for non-compliance. And it dovetails with the labour mobility provisions in last year's free trade (TILMA) agreement between Alberta and British Columbia."
The article also notes, "The provinces will get a similar message from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the largest business group in the country, which is making a rare presentation to the ministerial meeting in support of free trade within Canada...The chamber will recommend that provinces negotiate deals similar to the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) signed by B.C. and Alberta in 2006."
In a Press Release on June 7, “the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry, proposed that the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) be strengthened to ensure that Canadians enjoy the benefits of full labour mobility by April 1, 2009. The Minister made this proposal to his provincial and territorial counterparts at today’s meeting of the Committee on Internal Trade held in St. John’s.”
Apparently, the proposed April 2009 deadline for “full labour mobility” is the deadline toward which provincial governments were already working with the regulated professions under the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). Previously, the federal government had been calling on more provinces to join TILMA. Now it proposes to turn the AIT, to which all provinces are already committed, into something closer to TILMA. The federal government seems to be using the most popular piece of the “economic union” agenda - labour mobility - as a Trojan Horse to get TILMA’s dispute-settlement mechanism into the AIT….the thin edge of the wedge. In this sense, today’s announcement should be viewed as an attempted end-run around the mounting opposition to TILMA. (Erin Weir)
In his 1993 book, “The Fight for Canada: Four centuries of resistance to American expansionism”, David Orchard addresses Canada’s ongoing need to maintain a satisfactory level of independence from the much larger economy in America while protecting its sovereignty and resources from exploitation, particularly since NAFTA. Little did he know that today, 14 years later, his message would be even more urgent.
BACKGROUND
Unknown to most people, many developments have already been put in place towards the ultimate goal of joining the three countries into one economic entity:
1) The Canadian government is intimately involved
“To adhere to the desired time line for this project,” the CSIS report will, “derive its assumptions from existing projection scenarios [and] relevant future-looking work dealing with each of the six topics upon which the three governments have agreed—namely, labor mobility, energy, the environment, competitiveness, and border infrastructure and logistics” (emphasis ours). These are exactly the same policy areas currently being integrated between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. through executive level, closed-door meetings of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), agreed to by the leaders of all three countries in March 2005.
The next meeting of the SPP will take place this August 21-22nd in Montebello, Quebec, not far from Ottawa, and by the time it does, many more Canadian will be aware of it. Demonstrations are also planned for the event! Part of the reason that news of the SPP/deep integration issue is finally seeing the light of day is that opposition is growing and groups fighting the SPP are having an impact. Connie Fogal, leader of the Canadian Action Party (CAP), has been tirelessly speaking out against the deep integration for many months. The NDP continues to press the government on SPP secrecy and the Green Party's Elizabeth May has said deep integration will be a focus of the party's election platform. There are now 13 states in the USA now calling on Congress to abandon the SPP: Georgia, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Montana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Virginia. Grass roots protest against the SPP is also growing in Mexico.
2) Oil
A Calgary meeting on April 26 preceded the water (and environment) meeting; this one talked about "North American" energy. The beneficiary of these discussions is pretty clear when you realize Canada has no national energy policy. We are the only energy exporting country in the world without a one.
Gordon Laxer told the Parliamentary committee: "The National Energy Board wrote me on April 12: 'Unfortunately, the NEB has not undertaken any studies on security of supply.'" He was also told by the NEB that Canada does not maintain a 90-day energy reserve as other developed nations do. As Laxer points out, "Canada may be a net exporter, but it still imports 40 per cent of its oil - 850,000 barrels per day - to meet 90 per cent of Atlantic Canada's and Quebec's needs, and 40 per cent of Ontario's." Canada exports 63 per cent of its oil production and 56 per cent of its natural gas, percentages that can never decrease under NAFTA.
Mr. Laxer is perfectly correct to be concerned about eastern Canadians “freezing in the dark”.
3) Bulk Water Exports
The deep integrationists clearly see Canadian water as a North American resource, not a Canadian resource, and certainly not as part of the Commons, belonging to everyone and not to be sold. At yet another very private meeting, held in Calgary on April 27, 2007 under the auspices of yet another forum, it was made clear that water is on the table for negotiation. Discussion of bulk "water transfers" and diversions took place at a Calgary meeting of the North American Future 2025 Project (partly funded by the U.S. government). The meeting based its deliberations on the false notion that Canada has 20 per cent of the world's fresh water. Actual available supply amounts to only around six per cent - similar to that of the U.S.
However, on June 4, 2007, MP Peter Julian, NDP Trade Critic told us that ". . . the Motion on preventing bulk water exports that was brought to the House of Commons as a result of the NDP hearings on deep integration at the Standing Committee on International Trade passed last night in Parliament by a vote of 134 to 108, with all Conservatives voting against and with a couple of dozen Liberal MPs either absent or abstaining. All New Democrats voted in favour of this motion."
It remains to be seen what, if anything, the Harper government will do on this.
4) NAFTA Super Corridor
Part of the opposition by grassroots Americans is focused on plans for a so-called NAFTA Super Corridor: actually a corridor several hundred metres wide including rail lines, freeways and pipelines, running from un-unionized ports in Mexico, driven by non-unionized truckers, fast-tracked through the Smart Inland Port at Kansas City with it’s tailor-made Mexican Custom Office, to the Canadian border and beyond in every direction.
Plans continue for Saskatchewan’s very own Smart Inland Port (part of CISCOR, the Canadian Intelligent Super Corridor - a ‘national intermodal land bridge’- for the entire continent). Strategically located with access to our main highways, it will serve as the ‘nucleus’ to CISCOR and will sort and dispatch containers loaded with finished goods from Asia, primarily China, into Canada’s markets. Then, send them back empty down the Super Corridor to Asia for another load. Or, re-load them with our raw materials (uranium, oil, potash) and dispatch them through the ports of Vancouver or Prince Rupert to Asian factories (where labour is plentiful and cheap, and environmental laws are weak or nonexistent). According to their website www.ciscorport.com , the first step in developing CISCOR is to “initiate legislative reform”- reform such as that provided by TILMA?
There is a similar, though more informal (some say ‘chaotic’) process evolving in the Atlantic provinces, called "Atlantica." And B.C. is now pushing the so-called Gateway Initiative, a kind of regional superhighway project that will see huge and environmentally disastrous expansion of ports, highways and pipelines to further supply the U.S.'s insatiable demand for resources and cheap Asian goods.
Thus, the ultimate goal is to establish a smooth, seamless flow of our resources out and foreign finished goods into the country. From Project 2025, “The changing global production system and the increasing demand for a mobile labor supply will inherently affect domestic and international labor markets and wages into the year 2025.” Obviously labour is much cheaper in emerging economies like China and India, and the loss of manufacturing jobs in both the US and Canada will be disastrous, wiping out much of the working middle class while corporate giants continue to accumulate wealth.
5) Other developments in the underground process for deep integration include the consideration to abandon the dollar and use a common currency called the Amero; the ‘harmonization’ of Canada’s regulations regarding the level of pesticides on imported food (which we feed to our kids) with those of the US which, in some cases, is 40% higher; the downgrading of health protection which had been a NAFTA initiative, but is being "fast-tracked" as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (as well as some 300 regulatory regimes currently going through the same process); creation of Canada’s own "no-fly" list just like our U.S. "partner."; the 2003 CSIS report on “North American Economic Integration” which proposed that Canada and Mexico should work with the United States to take “concrete steps to create a North American security perimeter and further harmonization of immigration and refugee policies for those coming from non-NAFTA countries.”; the list goes on….
TILMA
For decades, the US Trade Representatives have complained about differences in our national and provincial regulations, finding them ‘irritating’. So, the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA), with its mandate to ‘reconcile’ and ‘harmonize’ existing (and future) regulations and standards, was introduced in BC and Alberta to begin the process of removing ‘barriers’ to economic development... to ‘soften up’ the Canadian public to the final step of integration.
TILMA, which came into effect in BC and Alberta on April Fools Day, 2007, has been hailed as a major step towards the elimination of allegedly large internal trade barriers in Canada. It is indeed a major piece of deep integration, is deregulation imperative and fits hand-in-glove with the SPP. It replicates, at the interprovincial level, the trend in modern “free trade” agreements to go well beyond traditional notions of free trade, or restrictions at the border such bans, tariffs or quotas. Like NAFTA, TILMA is better thought of as an investor rights agreement, providing rights backed by legal recourse to arbital panels if corporate entities feel that these rights have been “restricted” or “impaired”.
TILMA, with its so-called solution to ‘trade barriers’ – barriers which are minimal or do not exist at all – and with its enforcement mechanism, is similar to NAFTA, giving governments, private businesses or individuals the power to claim damages of up to $5 million where it is alleged that an existing or future measure offends TILMA rules. The dispute panels that rule on such claims are not democratically elected – yet their decisions are binding!
TILMA has the potential to uphold commercial interests (a corporate ‘Bill of Rights’ so to speak) and, when pitted against democratic decision-making, calls into question the ability of all levels of local governments to govern for the good of the people they represent - including their procurement practices, bylaws, local hiring policies, and local economic development programs.
Finally, the recent report by Conference Board of Canada on the high cost to interprovincial trade barriers has been found to be seriously flawed, having doubled its estimates through a simple error in arithmetic; even the CD Howe Institute described it as ‘widely exaggerated’. And, according to Economist Erin Weir of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Saskatchewan Government "should demand a refund" from the Conference Board of Canada!
So, Saskatchewan now finds itself caught between the business community and ardent free-traders, such as the Canada West Foundation, in one corner, and unions and leftwing nationalists, such as the Council of Canadians, in the other. As a result of this pressure from corporate-friendly supporters of this undemocratic scheme, Saskatchewan must decide whether to join TILMA, and risk "[selling] democracy to multinational corporations" or, according to (unrealistic) predictions made by the Conference Board of Canada, of possibly missing out on a Western economic mini-miracle in the making.
Since being revealed to the public, concerns have arisen about TILMA’s implications from trade unions, activist groups and municipal councils, and other provinces are also wary of signing on - in spite of corporate pressures to do so. Several Canadian cities (Saskatoon, Regina, Yellowknife) and organizations (SUMA) have already voiced their concerns and opposition to TILMA, and this will continue as more people find out what’s going on. The Council of Canadians, the CLC and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives held an SPP teach-in in Ottawa last month, and many civil society groups are now taking deep integration to their members.
TILMA was negotiated and signed in secret in 2006 (without public consultation and without legislation) by the premiers of BC and Alberta. Hopefully, the tide stops at the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, then recedes with repeal of the TILMA by a future BC or Alberta government so that Canadians can get on with the real and pressing economic and social issues facing the nation.
Many men and women have given their lives to keep our country ‘glorious and free’. When I stand to sing our national anthem and say these words, I need to know that they are TRUE!
If we want to save Canada, Premier Calvert, as the head of the Government of Saskatchewan, must say “NO” to TILMA!
Thank you.
Sources:
1) Council of Canadians:
http://www.canadians.org/
2) Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:
http://www.policyalternatives.ca/
3) North American Future 2025 Project:
http://www.canadians.org/water/document ... e_2025.pdf
4) A Deeper Look at Continental Integration under the SPP:
http://www.greenparty.ca/en/policy/docu ... r_look_spp
5) Threat to our Water: NAFTA, the SPP and Super-Corridors
http://www.americas.org/item_31581
6) The Plan to Disappear Canada - 'Deep integration' comes out of the shadows by Murray Dobbin - June 8, 2007 - TheTyee.ca
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/06/08/DeepIntegrate/
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NOTES:
Agenda for Public Consultations June 4 - 8, 2007 in Regina and June 11 - 14 in Saskatoon are available at: http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/committees ... lendar.htm
AUDIO of presentations: http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/committees/Main%20and%20Common%20Pages/MinVerbatims.htm#ECO