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CETA is more bad news for me and you Printer friendly page Print This
By Mitchell Thompson
Blacklisted News
Saturday, Jul 4, 2015

The Council of Canadians says corporations have direct influence over the terms of the Canada-EU trade deal and have used it to introduce policies that favour them over the public.

Sujata Dey, Trade Campaigner for the Council of Canadians says, “The push for multilateral trade deals is (though they say it’s for lower tariffs and more economic opportunity) usually because business interests are pushing the deals. There’s a huge amount of lobbying going on.”

Dey says that not only are businesses pushing for free trade policies, but are then often involved in writing the terms of the agreements between states.

Dey says, “There are all kinds of lobby groups working on the deal. It’s nebulous because it’s impossible to put our finger on who’s doing what, but groups like Business-Europe are very involved in lobbying, even the NGO tables and half of the NGOs are industry associations. It’s a horrible process that reflects the interest of the corporate agenda.”

Dey continues, “The people around the table are the people who make the decisions. Corporations obviously have a right to be at the table, because this affects them, but when they’re only at the table, it’s a problem.”

A report by the Council of Canadians identifies three primary corporate lobbies actively influencing the CETA negotiations. This includes BusinessEurope and the European Services Forum on the EU side and the Canada-Europe Roundtable for Business and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives here in Canada.

The Council says in its report that “in Europe, as in Canada, trade policy is developed in close, almost exclusive collaboration with industry lobby groups that have privileged access to negotiating texts. In the case of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), both governments and their trade negotiators have relied on industry lobby groups to flag profit-limiting trade barriers to be eliminated in the ongoing talks.”

The three lobby groups that the council has identified represent:
  • Areva
  • Arcelor
  • Bombardier
  • Bell Helicopter and EADS
  • Monsanto
  • Nexen
  • Siemens
  • Vale Inco
  • Air Canada
  • Barrick Gold Corporation
  • Bell Canada
  • Chevron Canada
  • CIBC
  • Deloitte
  • Dow Chemical
  • Enbridge
  • GE Canada
  • HSBC Canada
  • Imperial Oil
  • JPMorgan Chase
  • Microsoft
  • TransCanada
  • BDO
  • British Telecommunications Plc
  • Deutsche Bank AG
  • Deutsche Telekom AG
  • Deutsche Post DHL
  • Ernst & Young
  • Groupe La Poste
  • HSBC Holdings Plc
  • IBM Europe, Middle East & Africa
  • Inmarsat
  • KPMG
  • Microsoft Corporation Europe
  • Oracle Europe, Middle East & Africa
  • Orange
  • Prudential Plc.
  • Standard Chartered Bank
  • TCS (Tata Consultancy Services)
  • Telenor Group
  • Thomson Reuters
  • Zurich Financial Services, among others.
These connections give them a lot of power over the terms of multilateral trade deals, for example, the CCCE says its members alone “collectively administer $6 trillion in assets [and] have annual revenues in excess of $850 billion, and are responsible for the vast majority of Canada’s exports, investment, research and development, and training.” This makes pressuring governments into compliance quite easy.

The Council says the three groups use intersecting influence over government to shore up the interests of their often overlapping corporate clients in trade deals. For example: “BusinessEurope is notorious for having almost written the 2006 Global Europe export-led growth strategy, which includes an aggressive push to sign free trade deals with developing countries and key markets. Like the CCCE, the EU mega-lobby has what the European Commission – the governing body of the EU – itself calls ‘privileged’ access to political leaders.”

The Council quotes the Corporate Europe observatory which says, “BusinessEurope and other industry groups are regularly invited to exclusive meetings, where they are given access to sensitive information about ongoing trade negotiations – information that is withheld from public interest groups.”

The Council says that because of these overlapping industry powers that “in the end, corporate lobbying itself is the most trade-distorting part of international trade negotiations. By prioritizing the desires of corporate lobby groups, governments distort trade into serving the interests of big multinationals – not the public.”

Such influences set a dangerous precedent for the forthcoming TTIP trade deal, between the United States and the EU, with Kurt Hubner, professor at the University of British Columbia writing that “both, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the EU as well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US are interpreted as attempts to rebuild the Atlantic Economy.”

But, unfortunately, that rebuilding appears to be built by and for corporate power.


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