MEDIA ADVISORY
For Immediate Release
July 9, 2010

Council of Canadians to challenge Canada-EU trade deal in Brussels

Ottawa – A delegation from the Council of Canadians will be in Brussels July 12 to 16 to raise concerns about the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Members of the European Parliament.

Federal, provincial and territorial trade negotiators will enter a fourth round of trade talks with their EU counterparts next week in Brussels. The Council of Canadians is opposed to the deal, which will encourage the privatization of water services in Canada, extend NAFTA's anti-democratic investor protections to EU firms, and unreasonably limit the spending powers of cities.

The Council is calling for an end to the CETA negotiations, the opportunity to see and debate publicly the Harper government’s negotiating mandate, a commitment to revoke the Chapter 11 investor-state dispute process from NAFTA and other free trade agreements signed by Canada, and a commitment from the Harper government to permanently remove water from the scope of trade agreements while also declaring water a fundamental human right at the United Nations.

WHO: The Council of Canadians delegation will include Trade Campaigner Stuart Trew, Water Campaigner Meera Karunananthan, and Director of Campaigns Brent Patterson. They will be joined by Larry Brown, secretary-treasurer of the National Union of Public and General Employees, Scott Sinclair, senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Claude Vaillancourt, co-president of ATTAC-Quebec, and Catherine Caron, ATTAC-Quebec board member and assistant editor of Relations magazine.

The Council of Canadians, NUPGE and ATTAC-Quebec are members of the Trade Justice Network, a growing collection of environmental, labour and civil society organizations concerned with the scope and secrecy of the Canada-EU free trade negotiations.

QUOTES:

“This deal with the EU isn’t really about trade and it's definitely not about embracing European-style social policy, which might be nice. It’s about putting economic handcuffs on our cities and provinces, and further entrenching the same laissez-faire rules that led the world into the current economic crisis. We should be empowering people and communities, not corporations like the CETA deal will,” says Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

“EU trade negotiators are working on behalf of powerful water and other service companies who see trade agreements as a way to liberalize public services worldwide.  Their goal, shared by the Harper government, is privatization. The CETA could go well beyond NAFTA in the guarantees it gives European water companies around access to public contracts and perhaps even rights to the underlying water itself,” says Meera Karunananthan, water campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

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For more information:

Stuart Trew, trade campaigner, Council of Canadians: +1 (647) 222-9782; strew@canadians.org