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Brad Wall breaks his promise, signs TILMA/New West Partnership

As feared by the dozens of organizations and individuals who sent an April 22 open letter to Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall asking him not to sign a TILMA-like trade agreement, and over the objections of the hundreds of people who answered our Action Alert demanding the same, on Friday April 30 the premiers of Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia met at Government House in Regina to sign off on the New West Partnership (NWP) as 200 protesters rallied outside.

While Wall, Stelmach and Campbell have all tried to sell the NWP as a new deal, there is no doubt that it is TILMA, and that Brad Wall has broken his word to the people of Saskatchewan to not sign TILMA without major change. As we stated in an April 30 joint media release with the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, after we and everyone else in the three provinces finally got the chance to read the agreement that had just been signed, “Practically the only difference between the two trade agreements is the cover. Besides adding the word ‘Saskatchewan’ and changing ‘party’ to ‘parties’, there isn’t a different word between the two until page 7 and only a handful of paragraphs that are different through the whole agreement. I don’t know how Brad Wall can keep a straight face when he says he hasn’t signed TILMA.”

Like TILMA, the New West Partnership has a “no obstacles” clause (Article 3) which commits Saskatchewan to ensure that its measures do not operate to “restrict or impair trade,” a mutual recognition clause (Article 5) which will harmonize provincial standards and regulations to the lowest common denominator, and an investor-state dispute resolution process (Part IV), which gives trade panels the power to force governments to pay up to $5 million for any measure that violates the agreement. Procurement for all provincial government entities, Crown Corporations, municipal governments, school boards, and publicly-funded academic, health and social services are included in the agreement, with identical thresholds as those found in TILMA.

In addition to the trade agreement, the NWP also includes three agreements, on international cooperation, innovation, and procurement, but unlike the TILMA trade agreement none of these other three schedules of the NWP are legally binding and create no financial obligations on any of the provinces. They are, in other words, a weak attempt to disguise the fact that Saskatchewan was joining TILMA.

You can read the full text of the New West Partnership here, and compare it to TILMA here. You can read the Council of Canadians’ critiques of and concerns with TILMA – and now the NWP, since the trade agreements of the two are almost identical – here.

While Wall has already signed the agreement and brought Saskatchewan into TILMA, efforts against the agreement in Saskatchewan will continue in advance of the July 1, 2010 implementation date. Already in the Saskatchewan Legislature on both April 3 and April 4, the opposition NDP has called for public consultations and a ratifying bill to be debated in the Legislature.

In his report about the recent series of interprovincial trade agreements, State of Play, public interest lawyer Steven Shrybman noted how TILMA, the New West Partnership, the Ontario-Quebec Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the Partnership Agreement or Regulation and the Economy between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick link up with the Canada-EU trade negotiations happening this year:

“Canada’s goals in trade negotiations with the European Union are similar to those of its domestic trade agenda. Both seek through the modality of trade negotiations, to achieve the same outcome – namely to lock provincial governments into a policy framework that favours de-regulation and privatization.  Unfortunately, free trade with the EU is not expected to reflect the more progressive social and environmental policies of the European community. In fact, within the EU, neo-liberal trade and investment policies are often invoked by the European Commission to challenge progressive actions by member states.”

This view is backed up by statements from Canada’s lead negotiator in the European talks, Steve Verheul, who says the EU is seeking nothing short of a change to the Canadian constitution so that the provincial-federal relationship looks more like the EU-member state relationship. It is a political project of the Harper government and EU Commission, and interprovincial agreements like the NWP are making it happen without the national or provincial debate we need for an economic decision of this magnitude.

It’s not too late for the people of Saskatchewan to contact Premier Wall to tell him they’re upset that he broke his promise and signed TILMA without first releasing the text or holding any public consultations, and that they’re not fooled by the new coat of paint he slapped on this bad trade deal. You can contact Premier Brad Wall at bwall@mla.legassembly.sk.ca or (306) 787-9433.