If you needed proof that trade agreements are just an excuse to hand big business power at our expense, look no further than Ceta, a deal between the EU and Canada
Today, the Council of Canadians, in partnership with the European Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP and CETA, is launching CETA: Lessons from Canada, a five-minute animation. Using a technique known as “handimation”, the short video gives a comprehensive background on the controversial deal, known to many as TTIP 1.0.
The video is narrated by Maude Barlow, alternative Nobel Prize recipient and anti-globalization leader. Barlow is also an acclaimed author and chairperson of the Council of Canadians. It is based on her report: Fighting TTIP, CETA and ISDS: Lessons from Canada, which has been revised and reissued. The video and the report can be found here in English, German, French, Spanish, and Polish (report only).
Did you know that two looming trade deals, if passed by Congress, would newly empower 45 of the world’s 50 largest corporate climate polluters to “sue” governments in private tribunals over policies that keep fossil fuels in the ground?
Nova Scotia taxpayers will be on the hook for damages coming to a New Jersey concrete company that successfully appealed the 2008 denial of its quarry proposal on Digby Neck.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The promises made by NAFTA proponents and warnings issued by its opponents during the fierce 1993 debate over congressional approval of the pact can...
As previous updates - and many economists - have pointed out, the huge economic gains claimed for TTIP are largely illusory. The 119bn euros boost for the EU not only turns out to be under the most optimistic assumptions, clearly impossible to obtain now given the growing resistance to TTIP's de-regulation, but refers to 2027, and is the difference between an EU economy with TTIP and without. That means the claimed 0.5% GDP boost is actually a ten-year cumulative figure, and amounts to the rather less impressive 0.05% extra GDP on average - in mathematical terms, indistinguishable from zero given the very approximate nature of the models used to make these predictions.
On Tuesday August 5, the Harper government announced – via a brief news release, a teleconference call, and strangely an online video – that negotiators had finalized the 1,500-page text of a Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)[...]