NAFTA

Election 2008 fact sheets for activists

After 15 years under NAFTA Canada is a much more unequal society. 
Freetrade boosters still credit the agreement with increasing employment and prosperity, but though 'compensation' for a few corporate CEOs has rocketed up, NAFTA has in fact contributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs and exerted a downward pressure on wages. Here’s the real story on jobs and NAFTA: 

• In the last 6 years, we have lost 350,000 manufacturing jobs. That’s like 150 good jobs
disappearing every day. And it’s getting worse.

• The job loss is hitting many different industries all over the country: auto, food
processing, forestry products, textiles, metals, furniture etc. The details are different but
the story is the same: decline in orders lost to cheaper imports, missed investment, job
cutbacks and plant closures.

• Too many of the new jobs being created today are low-paying, insecure jobs with fewer
benefits, particularly for women.

• Canada is increasingly becoming a society of haves, and have-nots with the gap in wealth growing every year. 

A new government must act decisively to ‘manufacture’ good jobs

NAFTA, massive corporate tax cuts and do-nothing industrial policies promoted by Ottawa are destroying Canada’s manufacturing sector - this at a time when corporate profits are at an all time high. Free trade policies have hurt both Canadian workers and workers in poorer countries.

Mexican workers were promised that joining NAFTA meant that their wages would become ‘first world’ within a generation, but it hasn’t happened. This year hundreds of thousands of impoverished workers and landless farmers have repeatedly taken to the streets demanding that Mexico renegotiate NAFTA, or pull out. In Canada recent opinion polls show that a majority here also want to reopen NAFTA and get a better deal. A new Canadian government should:

• Renegotiate NAFTA to ensure more and better jobs, economic development and social justice – or get out of the agreement.

• Regulate foreign investment, ensure that new investment goes into strategic sectors, and target the creation of a new generation of ‘green jobs’.

• Re-invest in Canada’s social programs eroded during 15 years of NAFTA, and protect worker’s pensions from disappearing because of the actions of fly-by-night corporations.

• Provide a just income for the unemployed.

• Say no to any other ‘free trade’ deals in the works, especially with Colombia where trade unionists are being targeted in a state-sponsored campaign of annihilation. 

What you can do

o Ask the candidates what they will do to ensure more and better jobs

o Send an op. ed. to the media and/or write a letter to the local newspaper

o Spread the word at local union, community or church gatherings. 

Harper's record

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BLOCKING PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

Despite the scientific evidence, and an overwhelming consensus among Canadians that something must be done to slow global warming, the Harper government has been at the forefront of efforts to block and reverse progress in this area.

Climate Action Network named Canada the country most active in blocking, stalling or undermining the UN climate negotiations in Poland.

At the end of 2011 Canada became the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. A Montréal Gazette banner captured the international mood: “Kyoto rejection cements Canada’s rogue reputation.”


Canada has become the lead cheerleader for Big Oil and their neoconservative agenda. 

Clean Energy Jobs

Guess which industry employs more Canadians? The oilsands or clean energy?

Answer:   clean energy

Employment in Canada's clean energy sector has jumped 37% in the past five years, says a new report from the think tank Clean Energy Canada, and now exceeds employment in the oilsands.

There were 23,700 people directly employed by the clean energy industry in 2013, compared to 22,340 jobs in the oilsands

Those job gains were the result of about $25 billion in new investment over the past five years, the report said. It singled out Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia as the three provinces leading the way in clean energy investment.

The federal government has helped lay the groundwork for green energy, but has done very little to build on it.

Clean Energy Canada would like to see a federal industrial policy, based on tax and research incentives, like the one that helped Canada's aerospace and oil sands industries in their infancy.

If the federal government got engaged we could be a real world leader in clean energy, but the federal government is really missing in action.

Harper Conservatives - Income Inequality

Income Inequality Has Skyrocketed Under The Harper Conservatives

Neglect TV ad | Harper Conservatives are not there for you

JULIAN ASSANGE ON TPP

"It is mostly not about trade ... Only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade."

The others are about regulating the internet, and what information internet service providers have to collect, they have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances, the regulation of labor conditions, regulating the way you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital, health care system, privatization of hospitals, so essentially every aspect of a modern economy, even banking services are in the TPP.

So that is erecting and embedding new ultramodern neoliberal structure over U.S. law and the laws of other countries. And putting it in treaty form.

By putting it in a treaty form, there are 14 countries involved, that means it is very hard to overturn, so if there is a desire, a democratic desire to do it on a different path. For example, to introduce more public transport. Then you can’t easily change the TPP treaty, because you have to go back to the other nations involved.

What if, for example, the government or a state government decides it wants to build a hospital somewhere, and there is a private hospital has been erected nearby.

Well the TPP gives the constructor of the private hospital the right to sue the government over the expect loss, the loss in expected future profits. This is an expected future loss, this is not an actual loss that has been sustained, this is a claim about the future.

Governments can be sued over free trade treaties. For example, Togo, Australia, Uruguay are all being sued by tobacco company Phillip Morris to prevent them from introducing health warnings on cigarette packaging...

TPP -- Our Worst Nightmare

The Trans Pacific Partnership is our worst nightmare. It will affect everything from GMOs and labeling, food safety, environmental issues, public health, jobs, the Internet and much more and will give nearly unlimited power to the big corporations. 

TPP - Our Medicines

Time is running out to change a trade deal that could jeopardize people's access to affordable medicines

TPP would restrict access to generic medicines, making life-saving treatments unaffordable to millions.

TPP would give pharmaceutical companies longer monopolies over brand name drugs. Companies would be able to charge high prices for longer periods of time. And it would be much harder for generic companies to produce cheaper drugs that are vital to people’s health.

How much damage has to be done before people will finally start waking up?