Inside US Trade reports today (subscription) that Trans-Pacific Partnership countries meeting in San Diego this week for a 13th round of trade talks hope to finalize up to 12 chapters of the deal. If that happens, it would essentially lock Canada out of negotiations in a number of key areas, since Canada is not expected to join the talks until December. United States Trade Representative officials suggested to Inside US Trade that chapters on “sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, technical barriers to trade (TBT), regulatory coherence, customs, competition, and business facilitation,” among others, could be complete or nearly complete by the end of the week.
Canada was denied even an observer spot at the TPP talks this week in San Diego and will not be able to participate in a 14th round of negotiations in September. That’s because of a 90-day U.S. Congressional process that both Canada and Mexico, as the two newest TPP entrants, have to endure before being shown any text. Inside US Trade reported yesterday that Mexican Economy Secretary Bruno Ferrari is annoyed that this 90-day process has not yet started.
“The issue of when USTR will send the notification to Congress is also important because Mexico has agreed, as a condition for entering the ongoing TPP talks, that it will accept all TPP chapters that been closed out by current participants by the time the 90-day period expires,” said an article. “Thus, the longer it takes for USTR to send up the notification, the more time TPP partners have to close out chapters they are now negotiating, potentially precluding Mexico from influencing those areas of the talks.”
The same would apply to Canada. A USTR official is quoted in today’s Inside US Trade article as saying, “We have made the decision to allow both countries to join, but to do so in a way that doesn’t force us to renegotiate what we’ve just spent 14 rounds doing.”
A Canadian Press article today on the beginning of TPP talks in San Diego says, “Unlike past negotiations with Europe and India, the Harper government has not released a cost-benefits study to speculate how much could be gained and at what price.” TPP booster John Manley, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, admits the deal is “partly defensive for sure,” since market access in countries like Vietnam and Australia is not as important to the CCCE membership as making sure the Canada-U.S. economic relationship isn’t disrupted.
None of this is very reassuring considering how much is at stake here. According to an article by Michelle Chen for In These Times:
The White House is touting the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a “21st century” trade deal, but many activists see it as a regression into economic imperialism. The pact currently in negotiations-covering Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, with Canada and Mexico recently joining the talks-aims to establish a new trade regime that could intrude on domestic laws that affect millions of workers and consumers, from their weekly paycheck to their prescription medicines…
Market liberalization has previously spelled disaster for many U.S. workers. The recently finalized South Korea-U.S. trade deal, for instance, has been projected to eliminate about 159,000 U.S. jobs, according to a 2010 study by the Economic Policy Institute, and threatens to disrupt trade regulations in both nations’ auto industries.
According to Public Citizen’s analysis, working people might not only face the threat of job loss under TPP, but also the undermining of Medicare and Medicaid programs, new copyright restrictions that inhibit internet freedom, or attacks on the Buy American policy, which promotes the use of U.S. goods and services for government contracts.
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch campaign, calls the TPP “a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny” in The Nation magazine this month.
“Indeed,” she explain, “only two of the twenty-six chapters of this corporate Trojan horse cover traditional trade matters. The rest embody the most florid dreams of the 1 percent-grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation. They include new investor safeguards to ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources, and severely limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.”
Wallach’s organization, as well as the San Diego-Imperial Central Labor Council, Citizens Trade Campaign (CTC) and others, held a kick-off rally to welcome TPP trade negotiators yesterday outside where talks were set to begin. A Stop TPP Coalition, led by Occupy San Diego and others, is also planning a series of actions and educational events, the details of which will be announced online at StopTPP.org.
For more information on the TPP, see our campaign page. To sign a petition against TPP secrecy and its overbearing Internet rules, click here. Stay tuned for more information and more actions on the TPP…
