The latest threat to Medicare and public education has some familiar teeth and claws
By Ellen Gould

The lions are on the prowl, again. Just when victory over the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) had given us a chance to catch our breath, a new menace has been spotted in the tall grass of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) may yet prove to be the way the world's corporate lions get their MAI.

One of the worries of the MAI was its likely impact on public services - especially Medicare and education. The GATS has an advantage over the MAI: it already exists as one of the agreements administered by the WTO. Exposing the flanks of the public sector to corporate attacks through the GATS would just mean eliminating a clause here, tweaking a phrase there. The fierce measures already built into the GATS - it covers subsidies, it applies to all levels of government, and it bars discrimination between foreign and domestic service providers - would then start to bite.

The WTO's web site describes the GATS as "the first multilateral agreement to provide legally enforceable rights to trade in all services. It has a built-in commitment to continuous liberalization through periodic negotiations. And it is the world's first multilateral agreement on investment, since it covers not just cross-border trade but every possible means of supplying a service, including the right to set up a commercial presence in the export market."

In other words, the GATS has a built-in mechanism to ensure corporate domination will increase over time. Under the GATS, liberalization could just keep on going and going, presumably until negotiators run out of sectors to open up to foreign competition and ownership.

Corporate Claws
The U.S Coalition of Service Industries, a corporate lobby group, has told the American government what it wants from the GATS. The coalition says the agreement should make countries allow majority foreign ownership of health care facilities. They are particularly keen on gaining access to the "rapidly expanding health care expenditures in many developed countries due to an increase in their aged population." The coalition complains that "public ownership of health care has made it difficult for U.S. private-sector care providers to market in foreign countries." But they are convinced that "we can make much progress in the [GATS] negotiations to allow the opportunity for U.S. businesses to expand into foreign health care markets."

The U.S. government is only too eager to deliver what their corporations want. This was made clear in a speech in June by U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshevsky.

Barshevsky revealed U.S. plans to negotiate a radical rewriting of how the GATS works and what it covers. Currently, the GATS is a "bottom-up" agreement, which means that only those services actually listed by countries are opened up for negotiation. The MAI was a "top-down" agreement, meaning that everything was covered unless specifically excluded. Barshevsky wants to make the GATS a top-down agreement. She intends to expand the GATS to include Medicare and education - public services that are currently excluded.

Thrown to the Lions
The U.S. is not alone in pushing hard for changes to the GATS. The European Union is also on side. Anti-MAI activists in Canada cheered when France pulled out of negotiations and effectively killed the deal, but EU bureaucrats did not get the message. Michel Servoz, the official responsible for services negotiations on behalf of Europe, declared at an international conference in June that no services should be excluded from the GATS talks and that education and health in particular were "ripe for liberalization."

If you have a hard time believing this could come out of Europe, with its strong public sector, here it is again in the official statement of the EU's objectives in the GATS negotiations: "The EU's main aim is to increase opportunities for world-wide market access for all services sectors by addressing any obstacles and improving conditions for setting up businesses... More disciplines are needed to strengthen market access and to guarantee that services can be supplied in a free market environment."

As for Canada, by the summer of 1998 our officials had already agreed to an all-inclusive approach for both the Free Trade Area of the Americas and WTO talks on services. This makes the federal government's recent cross-country "consultations" on the WTO a bit of a joke, since they never let on that Canadian public services will be thrown into the lions' den at the next round of negotiations.

Maybe that's because they're on the side of the lions.