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Canada-EU trade deal: “dubious trade benefits and a number of serious downsides,” write Jacobs and Culpeper

The proposed Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement “presents Canadians with dubious trade benefits and a number of serious downsides,” says an op-ed in today’s Ottawa Citizen by John Jacobs and Roy Culpeper. Arguing that CETA can only increase Canada’s dependence on raw resource exports and make it more difficult to climb up the processing food chain, Jacobs and Culpeper conclude that, “Canada would be better off without CETA, and for that matter all ‘free trade’ agreements that demonstrably do not produce the benefits they advertise while subordinating our democratic choices to the priorities of multinational investors.”

Jacobs, a PhD candidate at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy & Administration/Institute of Political Economy, has written several province-specific reports on CETA for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the most recent on the expected impacts of a deal on Manitoba. Culpeper is the former president of the North-South Institute and a Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. You can read their Ottawa Citizen op-ed here.