Canada is a trading nation. Trade agreements are good for Canada. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not one of those.
With a few exceptions, Canada’s trade barriers are already low and the TPP will have little effect on trade. Professor Blayne Haggart from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, says it’s all about increasing corporate power. Sections that are supposed to be incidental riders are the real essence:
“Instead, agreements such as the TPP are about implementing policies that have nothing to do with comparative advantage, policies that are often designed to lead to higher consumer costs and concentrated corporate power. Treated as marginal issues, these policies are ‘free-trade free-riders,’ coasting along on an unearned legitimacy.”
By “comparative advantage” he means trade between partners that benefits both. “Costs are lowered, production is maximized and people can buy imports at prices lower than would have prevailed had they produced everything themselves,” explains Haggart in the Globe and Mail.
The TPP is not a free trade agreement; it’s a consolidation of U.S. interests globally. The details have to be carefully dissected but here are a few things that we know.
One of the “free-trade free-riders” is intellectual property. The U.S. wants to extend the patent protection for drugs to prevent generic manufacturers from providing cheaper medicines. Groups such as Doctors Without Borders warn that greater drug-patent protection would “limit competition from generic drug manufacturers that reduce drug prices and improve access to treatment, and would accelerate already soaring medicine and vaccine prices.”
Another is extended copyright length. The TPP would extend the life of copyrights from 50 years to 70 years beyond the life of the author. This would benefit U.S. media companies and provide little benefit for artists or the public. Copyright holders are often corporate media giants like Disney.
If the negotiators of the TPP were honest, they would admit that this is not a “partnership,” it’s an imposition of U.S. interests on trading partners. One of the biggest U.S. exports is American culture, what they like to call the entertainment industry. Another is health care. These are the money-makers that the U.S. wants to protect.
One more free-trade free-rider is the infamous “investor-state dispute settlement.” It places corporations on the same level of states, allowing foreign firms to sue countries, not only for breach of contract but for public policies such as environmental protection and access to drinking water.
As I explained in my column of October 15, Canada is already on the receiving end of the most dispute claims under NAFTA. We can expect more under the TPP as corporations try to bring our public policies in line with their private interests.
Yet another provision would allow car manufacturers to hide operating codes that allow them to cheat on emission regulations the way Volkswagen did under the guise of intellectual property. These codes should be examined by regulators the way that slot machines are.
Just how bad the TPP is for Canada has yet to be determined. The 6,000 pages of the secretly negotiated agreement have only been recently released. One thing that should make us suspicious is when supporters call it a free trade agreement.
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