MEDIA RELEASE
For Immediate Release
August 25, 2010

Did AbitibiBowater settlement create private water rights? Public needs answers, says Council of Canadians

Ottawa – The $130 million NAFTA settlement handed to pulp and paper company AbitibiBowater yesterday by the federal government could have constitutional repercussions affecting provincial jurisdiction and water governance according to the Council of Canadians. The organization is demanding that the terms of the deal be made public.

“Water is a public resource to be managed by governments in the public interest,” says Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

“If AbitibiBowater has in any way been compensated for the loss of water and timber rights, as the company is suggesting, the Harper government’s hundred million dollar buyout would turn water into private property. Imagine the consequences of handing oil and gas companies operating in the tar sands this same right to draw water or else be compensated,” says Barlow.

Unlike the United States and other countries, Canada rejected private property as an inalienable right when it signed a new Constitution into law in 1982. This NAFTA settlement with AbitibiBowater proves again how investment guarantees in free trade agreements have forced private property rights into Canadian law – with high costs for Canadians and few if any possible benefits to the management of Canada’s economy, natural resources in particular. If the company is telling the truth that not only its assets but its water and timber rights have been compensated for, the threat to water management in Canada will be high.

The Council of Canadians is also astonished that AbitibiBowater was let off the hook recently by a Quebec court from having to foot the bill of the needed environmental cleanup of its now inoperative plant in Newfoundland.

“This NAFTA settlement tells multinational companies around the world that Canada will pay them to eliminate jobs and to pollute the environment,” says Barlow. “NAFTA made these kinds of settlements inevitable by letting investors challenge even public health and environmental policy directly as indirect expropriations of their profits. The anti-democratic Chapter 11 dispute process should be gutted from NAFTA and a more balanced international investment regime put in place.”

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For more information:

Dylan Penner, Council of Canadians, Media Officer, (613) 795-8685; dpenner@canadians.org