Vancouver & Burnaby Chapter

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Trade

Since the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s, Canadians have been bombarded with so-called 'free trade' deals: NAFTA, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), and more recently the Trade, Investment, and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA).

What these agreements all have in common is that they have been 'top-down' deals, imposed by governments at the insistence of big business. They have all been about deregulation and investors’ rights. Their goal has been to create a 'free' market in which big business calls all the shots and governments either get out of the way entirely, or work only to cater to the needs of big business. These agreements were supposed to have improved the lot of Canadians, but after a generation of living with these agreements, Canadians are working harder than ever for less money—in real terms— than they were making before free trade.

Let’s be clear: the Council is not against trade. But we believe in fair trade, that is, trade that respects the rights of workers, that safeguards the environment, and that operates to enhance the public good, not sabotage it.

It has been a long, hard struggle against unfair trade agreements, but we have had some successes: we defeated the MAI, and the FTAA seems like it is almost dead. And we have made significant progress in raising awareness about the dangers posed to the public good by TILMA: for example, working with our STOP TILMA coalition partners, we succeeded in getting the Union of B.C. Municipalities to pass a strong anti-TILMA resolution.