Harper gambling away municipal rights with EU trade deal, FCM delegates told

News release from Council of Canadians  June 3 2011

Halifax, NS – Municipal councillors from across the country arrived in Halifax today for the annual general meeting of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the Council of Canadians was there to greet them. Activists from the organization wanted to let municipal leaders know how the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) Canada is negotiating with the European Union will negatively affect municipal powers and local democracy.

“Municipalities will be directly impacted by the EU trade deal, and yet some councillors we spoke with had not even heard of it before,” says Angela Giles, Atlantic Regional Organizer with the Council of Canadians, who joined local activists outside the FCM convention. “Several others knew of CETA but were interested to learn more about how the deal will impact their municipalities specifically.”

The Council of Canadians chose a gambling theme because in the grand scheme of the CETA negotiations, municipalities are mere tools to help the federal government satisfy EU procurement requests. Council activists outside the FCM convention handed out specialized poker chips with stickers that said “Fisheries”, “Green jobs” and “Clean energy”, along with “CETA: don’t gamble with our cities” on the other side. Some handouts were developed specifically with municipal leaders in mind, tying the impacts of CETA to issues like local democracy, public water and investment.

“Communities across Canada are increasingly concerned about the secretive Canada-EU trade negotiations and some of them are passing resolutions demanding that cities and towns be kept out of CETA altogether,” says Kyle Buott, president of the Halifax-Dartmouth and District Labour Council. “We strongly feel this is the only way to protect ‘buy local’ policies that communities are embracing as a way to become environmentally and economically secure.”

Under CETA, buy local policies will simply be banned by new rules on procurement designed to open up new profit opportunities to large EU-based multinational firms. The deal will also compromise ethical or sustainable purchasing strategies by municipalities, school boards, hospitals or Crown corporations. Additional investment commitments on services by the provinces, in combination with these procurement rules, will make it difficult to ensure services such as drinking water and wastewater treatment, energy or transit remain in public hands.

Background information is available at: www.canadians.org/CETA