Earth day isn’t just for turning off lights.

“The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place, in the family of things.” Mary Oliver

We are the Earth – Where I live in southwestern Ontario, the daffodils have popped their heads above ground and the rains are starting. It’s a relief to be in the fold of spring, and the perfect setting to experience immediate connection with the planet. Corporate culture distracts us from our fundamental reality – that we are made of the earth. With all the bobbles and trinkets, it’s super easy to get distracted from the natural systems we rely on daily. We ourselves are talking and walking thanks to the hydrologic cycle. Commercial globalization creates pretty shiny packages, leaving little trace of earth. The disconnect is obvious in the kneejerk debates pitting the environment against the economy, our community health against jobs. Its most extreme incarnation is international law to protect corporate profits – free trade pacts. These, and the WTO, provide the only international legal plan we have for our collective futures. Scary how far we have ventured from reality.

The Eco-nomy – A constant hum of goods and services zipping around the planet. That’s the dream of corporate globalization, and every new trade deal makes this more of a reality. But can we afford it? Can the Maldives? Haiti? New Orleans? Trade, the way it’s written now, is a competition to extract and sell as much as possible to increase GDP, and it’s pushing our earth systems to the limit. This global orchestration requires continual increases in production which means deeper extraction of the earth. Trade-ables are shipped at dizzying pace, primarily by burning fossil fuels. The more a country does this, the higher their GDP, and the more trading power they are deemed to have. This is the present trajectory under which we live, regardless of how many lights we turn off in our homes or how many lawns we clean of debris.

Earth as Externality — Earth Day isn’t just for turning off lights, though it’s important to model respectful habits. It’s about redressing the greatest myth of this era – that earth is external to the economy. Our whole lives, from the clothes we wear to cover our bare bottoms (plant derived) to the cell-phones we communicate with (mineral base) to food and drink, everything is constructed, albeit sometimes highly processed, from the body of the earth. Earth is not outside the economy, earth is the mother of economy. Even powering a device to read these words requires earth sources. Because trade is based on an externalized model of how life works, the global economy is exponentially expensive when fully calculated. A whole lot of values are rapidly being spent that are never accounted for. Consider the worth of water now in places like California. And, how many millions of years of decomposition does it take to make a fossil fuel patch?

Trade Law Halts Renewable Energy Programs – Trade embraces the concept of “externality” to deal with any concern, environmental or social, that is outside dollar profit. It does so to our great disadvantage because externalities have no power in trade rulings, and trade law supersedes our laws. Energy programs are no exception. Many cases have been made against countries’ fledgling renewable energy programs from China to India, Italy to Greece, and Canada. In 2012, the WTO ruled against Ontario’s Green Energy Act. The act was set to launch Canada’s most populated province off coal and onto clean energy in five years while creating a lot of new jobs. The plan provided feed-in tariffs so companies could earn money back from the grid at secure rates. Twenty-seven billion dollars was invested by a variety of suitors in exchange for supporting local workers and industry. It earned buy-in from labour, business, and the government of Ontario because it provided local jobs in manufacturing. By 2014, it created 31 000 jobs and employed skilled manufacturers like those who lost their jobs under NAFTA. The WTO ruled against Ontario’s sustainable plans because the Green Energy Act required between 40 and 60% of materials and jobs to be local. The WTO said the problem was with the buy-local requirements, not renewable energy. Ontario was charged with discriminating against the international corporations, and pressured to drop the local economy focus.

Sustainable Means Local — The problem with the WTO’s solution for Ontario is that creating new industry does not work without creating local opportunity. New industries are made possible through business buy-in. The energy plan was intended to be fully sustainable – including using local materials and workers. Due to the ruling,the province dropped the local focus, and some of the solar companies collapsed. Economy and ecology are deeply linked because they happen in tandem. Outside of its political troubles, the Green Energy Act is a remnant of its potential. Ontario has certainly not gone fully green yet. Trade policy is driving sad energy outcomes in Ontario, and across the globe in towns and cities, regions and nations.

Treaties for the Earth – There is a legal platform to heal the derelict notion that the earth is an externality. Granting legal rights to the earth, through public trust doctrine and the sanctioning of earth rights (The Rights of Mother Earth), would save our lives and those of the new generations coming to this beautiful planet. The Rights of Mother Earth does not deny global trade but would tame the pathology of its present form. Trade as it exists in the free market has abstracted itself out of our living reality. If its trajectory is not redirected by the people, it will externalize us right off the planet. Our communities will only be well when we know the environment feeds the economy and the economy cares for the earth.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, American Poet

Jennifer Chesnut

Trade Justice London 
London, Ontario Chapter
Council of Canadians

Originally published in:

http://newgenerationtrade.com/2015/04/21/earth-day-isnt-just-for-turning-off-lights/

The Battle to Buy Local

Some leaders in government are rejecting a binding treaty that diminishes buy-local and allows corporations to sue us if we don’t comply. Do the rest feel that it’s okay? 

Being able to buy and source locally in goods and services is the heartbeat of a community. People value procurement power — it’s key to community security and happiness. Farmer’s market, post office, city square — local procurement not only secures jobs but it’s the fabric of community relationships. With free trade, local exchange is being shrunk to carve out markets for transnational corporations, and a super-national law system, ISDS, is being erected to enforce this goal. 

Last week, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador took a stand. Premier Paul Davis told the federal Conservatives they would not take part in the CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, without compensation. The province join an ignored group of approximately forty Canadian municipalities who between 2010 and 2014 sent resolutions to upper government requesting exclusion. The concern for the province and the city councils is CETA’s restrictions to buying and processing locally. Newfoundland is refusing to participate because of these impacts on fisheries. Jobs in fish plants are expected to be lost to align with the ban on local standards. The province says that the federal government originally agreed to compensate for the incalculable loss with $280 million in a fisheries fund. The province wanted to use part of the money to help transition lost workers. CETA will nullify sub-national policy. Newfoundland and Labrador’s — Minimal Processing Requirements (MPR) — provincial rules to ensure that a percentage of fish from coastal waters is processed by local workers will be trumped by trade laws. 

Newfoundland is not alone. In 2013 and 2014, Toronto requested the federal and provincial government exclude them because of restrictions imposed on essentials like local food networks. Toronto is unwilling to relinquish job creation initiatives. Some transit vehicles are sourced in the region on purpose. Though more expensive to set up locally, in the end, the jobs created boost Toronto’s economy and community well-being. 

It’s not just the new CETA restrictions, it’s the severity of their enforcement under ISDS. If ignored, the government opens itself to lawsuits from transnational corporations. In this historical moment of developing the long-term rules of relationship between the EU and North America, instead of giving special legal rights to corporations for accessing contracts in our cities, we could rewrite procurement to explicitly protect local decision-making for jobs, environmental protections and social well-being. We could set a precedent for the security of the whole globe by removing ISDS from the CETA; this may be what Germany and France are now pushing for. Forget minimum standards of treatment for a corporation. Appropriate trade would set enforceable standards of treatment for people in Newfoundland and beyond. 

Some sub-national governments are looking at the implications on communities in the future under these multi-decade treaties. It’s time the rest put on their spectacles. We need to source and build locally for jobs, for the climate, for our well-being. A legal system that battles for the rights of corporations to make profit has no business interfering with the ancient exchange of local goods and services. Who next is willing to stand up for local buying, building and being? 

Jennifer Chesnut

Trade Justice London 
London, Ontario Chapter
Council of Canadians

Originally published in:

http://newgenerationtrade.com/2015/01/25/the-call-for-economic-justice-gets-louder-nfld-labrador-joins-canadian-cities-blocking-the-ceta-lawsuit-deal/

Further Reading:
http://www.canadians.org/blog/ceta-appears-wobbly-provincial-dispute-isds-lurks-horizon

The Brave New World of Climate Change and Trade

It’s no secret that the purpose of free trade is to send services and goods around the globe without restriction. What most don’t know is that restrictions are increasingly denied for things we want like environmental, health and job protections. When market access for corporations is restricted for these reasons or to simply carve out a little bit of love for the local economy, it’s deemed a bad thing. The legalese labels this “discriminatory”. Favouring local jobs, goods, and services is in fact illegal in the wild world of trade because local sourcing can cause expropriation of a global corporation’s anticipated profit “assets”. Countries are not just given a verbal reprimand. New generation trade allows profit seekers to wield lawsuits in special courts against protective laws. Corporations can sue nations because they are using laws to protect the public in trade courts. Even more shocking, we cannot sue back. It’s a one way process called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). This system transfers the power of law from nation states to investors. It is appropriately called Investor State for short.

On Sunday past, the National TPP Team with MoveOn.org organized a trade webinar featuring Canadian author Naomi Klein about the TPP (the Trans Pacific Partnership ~ see Trade Justice Dictionary), other new generation deals, and climate change. Klein summarized the intimate relationship between climate change and this style of international policy and gave examples of how free trade has supported the traditional energy giants. She shared how Lone Pine corporation is suing Canada for 230 million under NAFTA because of Quebec’s fracking moratorium. Doing what governments are employed to do, Quebec passed a temporary ban on fracking while researching impacts to people and water in the St. Lawrence region. NAFTA, which heavily features free market energy transfers, opened the doors to Investor State trade lawsuits about energy production.

In this time of serious environmental challenges, we need to be able to build our local economies and to source green energies without threat of lawsuit. One direction lawsuits from corporations to countries for loss of profits cannot create the right climate for humanity’s dilemma. On a planet with dangerously high emissions, we need to also invest substantially in the local economy to bring balance back. We need to have law on our side. May we begin to seriously care for our futures and our children’s by enacting policy that promotes climate security.

Jennifer Chesnut

Trade Justice London 
London, Ontario Chapter
Council of Canadians

Originally published in:

http://newgenerationtrade.com/2015/01/14/climate-change-and-trade-deals-with-naomi-klein/

Pulling a Canada

What’s the big idea behind corporations suing Canadians?

In the last couple years I came across a phrase in trade talk being whispered behind our backs. “Pulling a Canada.” Peculiar. Nothing like the Canadian self-image of champion – in hockey, coffee and geographic beauty. Reading the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) January 2015 report, I think I understand what the chiding is about.

The lawsuits. Did you know that through trade agreements countries are being sued for having policies that diminish the profits of corporations? Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is what this beast is called. In secret trade courts a corporation sues to have a policy removed. Corporations are given special rights beyond citizens to use trade constructs such as Most Favoured Nation or National Treatment (see Trade Justice Dictionary) any time they feel anticipated profits may be shrunk by health, labour, environmental or local laws. There is no mechanism for countries to sue back. Trade-legal outcomes supersede national laws and force changes in policy or risk further payment of hefty fines. Taxpayer money pays them out. ISDS – with its easily forgettable acronym sounds irrelevant. Of course, it isn’t. It’s as intimate a thing as the rules you set in your household and the budget you draft in your bank. Its influence enormous from the wide lens though subtle to see at first. The impact felt not only by your family. Multiply it by the wallets of all the families in your country. That’s the power of a trade deal.

From environmental protections to health care costs, Canadians have been charged with more lawsuits than any other developed nation. The CCPA report summarizes so far under NAFTA, Canada has been the target of 45% of NAFTA’s investor state lawsuits within the three signatory nations. Here is the score: Canada — 35, Mexico — 22, and the US — 20. In terms of payment, the US has not yet lost a case. Canada has lost six paying out 170 million so far. Mexico has paid for five at a cost of 210 million.

Canada has paid Investor State fines to gasoline, paper, and oil companies but we have never had so many transnational companies suing us as we do right now. If all the present cases were to pass in trade courts, Canadian taxpayers would have to pay out over six billion dollars according to the CCPA report.

We could become the biggest loser on the globe.

The rules of the game are clearly wrong. It’s absurd to defend hard-earned laws against the risk they pose to profits of large corporations hosted in the lands of our trading partners. (The people who work diligently day to day in the ground offices of these corporations are neither told nor consulted.) With this emerging international system that behaves like its the law, we are changing the very standards of our lives far into the future.

Is it accurate to frame trade as a game? If we do, it might be more appropriate to call it Russian Roulette with our children’s futures. Those with the biggest guns, tend to win. With serious issues facing Canadians and our brothers and sisters across this globe, it’s time to look deeply at what our country is doing with the collective budgets of all our houses.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/newsroom/news-releases/nafta-investor-state-claims-against-canada-are-out-control-study

Jennifer Chesnut

Trade Justice London 
London, Ontario Chapter
Council of Canadians

Originally published in
http://newgenerationtrade.com/2015/01/22/pulling-a-canada/

Trade Justice Workshop: FIPA and CETA

Workshop on the FIPA and CETA: International laws created for corporations. 

"Trade is the transfer of power from citizens to corporations." Maude Barlow, Chair of the Council of Canadians 

 This workshop, given by our Trade Justice Chair, Jennifer Chesnut, will explore new generation trade pacts, the CETA and the Can-China FIPA, their purposes and consequences. We will map similarities between these deals and what they mean for the new frontier of international laws benefiting corporations. Special emphasis on Investor State Lawsuits and strategies for creating trade justice. 

 What do you think fair trade looks like? 

 Wed. Oct. 29/2014 @ 5pm EVAC, 757 Dundas St.

I’ve been thinking about how corporations are suing countries.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about transnational corporations suing countries. The fancy name for this is Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and it happens in free trade. ISDS is on my mind a whole bunch as Germany speaks out about the inclusion of ISDS in the soon to be announced CAN-EU CETA deal.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/campact/sets/72157647398779707/ 

ISDS was first employed in NAFTA , the North American Free Trade Agreement. Some say this deal, circa 1994, was the first New Generation deal partly because of its use of Investor State. ISDS is a trade legal mechanism for how the pacts are enforced. It affords corporations the opportunity to sue nation states if the profits they expected from the opening of specific sectors in a free trade deal are diminished because the country has laws or policies that prevent earnings. Ethyl Corporation was the first to successfully sue Canada in the mid nineties, for approximately 16 million, when Canada attempted to bar its gasoline additives. Researchers in Canada believed their additives could be carcinogenic. Ethyl won on the grounds that profits expected as a result of NAFTA were lost. There have been hundreds of cases administered through trade tribunals since and the number of cases launched is on the incline every year. Through leaked texts in German news and other places, critics of CETA have said that corporations will be able to sue countries when municipalities use public money for various buy-local initiatives, municipal procurement, and protection of local public management, but no ones knows for certain as the text has not been shared publicly. 

Let’s talk trade that works. Opening borders to gastronomic delights! to expertise in regions that most benefit! How about encouraging the growth of sale in specialty items (like fair trade bananas) that could give economic stability to a struggling country? But when you get into lawsuits waged in a one way direction from corporations to countries, it feels like we are no longer talking about trade. The conversations turns a whole lotta dark. People don’t like it. Investor State creates an Investor’s State superimposed on a Nation State. This is the kind of trade that makes people uncomfortable. It’s the kind of design that will sink itself. 

People from Canada, Germany, France, and many other locales in between are bidding Investor State Adieu. Adios. Au Revoir. 

We are entering a new era — one of critical trade justice understanding that will not tolerate excessive corporate rights at the expense of family and community well being — whether or not we call them new generation free trade, CETA, or we@#$@#lkflskdjfls investor state ding-a-ling.

Jennifer Chesnut 
Trade Justice Chair

Originally published on September 21, 2014 at
http://newgenerationtrade.com/2014/09/21/ive-been-thinking-about-corporations-sueing-countries/