The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) is holding hearings across the country this week into the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The hearings are in Calgary June 26, Regina the 27th, Winnipeg the 28 and Toronto the 29th. Notice of the hearings was sent out June 7. The column below addresses some of the issues involved.
Financial Post, by Murray Dobbin
The tragedy of the deaths in Walkerton continues to haunt Canadians right across the country. At the heart of this grief is the inescapable fact that these were utterly senseless deaths - in normal times routinely prevented. It is painful to think that just five years ago before deregulation/ privatization mania struck they would probably not have happened. It was a matter of the most basic of public services, or, in the words of a certain premier, a matter of "common sense."
The only source of relief over the Walkerton tragedy is that people assume that at least it will lead to measures to ensure it won't happen again. The investigations will, surely, lead to the re-establishment of high standards for health protection and public service.
But even as the Walkerton story continues to unfold the federal government has committed enormous resources to expanding a World Trade Organization agreement that could make returning to saner times all but impossible. In the words of WTO official David Hartridge, this agreement makes liberalization "irreversible".
The agreement in question is the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and it is the subject of a furious round of negotiations going on right now in Geneva. WTO negotiators have set themselves no less a goal than to come up with binding rules to limit what all 137 member nations of the WTO - plus all of their subnational governments - can do in the area of regulation over services.
The WTO has said that these new rules will automatically apply to all services without exception. The scope is breathtaking. At stake are issues as diverse as how strict our standards are for hospitals, whether we can protect historic buildings or control the invasion of big box stores, the kind of limits we put on tourist development in sensitive ecological areas - and the treatment and testing of drinking water.
It also includes reviewing the qualifications we require of doctors, engineers and other professionals to ensure they're not too high. Letting trade bureaucrats judge the standards for professions can be scary. The GATS has already established rules for licensing accountants and many officials want to apply these across the board to all professions. European officials have expressed reservations. "The consumer interest in the [medical] professions is seen by some as being `paramount and far greater than for accountants.'"
According to a leaked briefing note WTO staff circulated to negotiators in May, the job at hand is to devise rules that will achieve a "balance between two potentially conflicting priorities: promoting trade expansion versus protecting the regulatory rights of governments." Who, though, is at the negotiating table to champion the sovereign right to regulate? The process of finding a "balance" is itself absurdly unbalanced, having been delegated exclusively to those who have the job of promoting trade.
That is where public hearings might come in handy. Indeed, this week the federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) along with their provincial counterparts are hosting hearings in Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Halifax on the services negotiations. But the hearings are so flawed they amount to little more than farce. Only a chosen few are to be consulted. Those who have actually expressed the most interest in the negotiations and asked for public hearings are not invited.
Perhaps the biggest deficiency is that the government's "consultation" papers on these negotiations seem designed to deliberately conceal what is actually happening. They are clearly intended to rouse support for the negotiations from anyone who might have the vaguest hope of exporting a service, and reassure the rest of us.
But what the negotiators are actually doing in all these meetings at WTO headquarters is not reassuring. Restricted WTO documents leaked in Europe indicate negotiators are currently working up a list of what will be acceptable as a "legitimate" government objective for any regulation governing services. That of "safeguarding the public interest" has already been rejected. WTO staff suggest that "promoting competition" or "economic efficiency" be added. Canada and others ganged up on the European Commission for suggesting the list of legitimate objectives might include "protection of the environment" and "ensuring pluralism and a media system based on free and democratic principles."
Canada has produced its own paper on domestic regulation; unfortunately it isn't available. What is outrageous about these two processes - the actual negotiations and the "consultations" in Canada - is who gets to see what. Canada is negotiating with 136 other counties and presumably that means we are trying to get as much as we can while giving up as little as possible. But all of our supposed adversaries have complete access to critical documents including Canada's paper while Canadians being "consulted" do not. Maybe that's the point. In the minds of DFAIT negotiators, it's ordinary Canadians who are the adversaries.:
