A Tireless Voice

A tireless voice for Canada and all of its iconic values, Maude Barlow urges us not to lose heart.

Her reminders of the terrible things the Harper regime has done to undermine civil society through funding cuts and tax audit witch hunts is truly sobering, and we should all be outraged, but her words should also galvanize us to stand up, defend, and fight for everything that makes Canada the unique and enviable country it is.

Otherwise, the barbarians will have won.

Motor City Madness: A Mound of Sound Guest Post

The City of Detroit is the poster child for municipal meltdown. It’s generally known that Detroit is bankrupt after decades of steady decline and the flight of most of its wealthy (white) citizens. There is no shortage of graphic photographs of abandoned and derelict buildings, the remnants of once viable neighbourhoods.

Not everyone could afford to flee Detroit. Poverty was their invitation to stay put. However staying put in a city in collapse ain’t cheap. With businesses gone and wealthy residents gone someone still has to pay for basic infrastructure and that someone would be the poor who can’t afford to leave.

Enter Maude Barlow the head of the Council of Canadians and world renowned expert on water issues. Ms. Barlow wears many hats. In her capacity as founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of Food and Water Watch, she has written a wrenching report to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Water on the plight of Detroit’s left behind residents.

Barlow complains that Detroit’s austerity proconsul, appointed by the state governor, is breaching the human rights of Detroit residents by denying them access to clean, safe water. At the moment, water utility crews are being kept busy, very busy, cutting off water service to 3,000 homes each week. The city needs $5-billion in water service repairs and upgrades. Meanwhile the utility continues to lose water from broken pipes in abandoned homes and buildings. Someone has to pay for that lost water. Someone must pay.

Barlow isn’t pulling any punches. She’s directly accusing the government of using the water crisis to drive poor black people out of the city, to cleanse it in order to facilitate gentrification.

The case of water cut-offs in the City of Detroit speaks to the deep racial divides and intractable economic and social inequality in access to services within the United States. The burden of paying for city services has fallen onto the residents who have stayed in the economically depressed city, most of whom are African-American. These residents have seen water rates rise by 119 per cent within the last decade. With official, understated unemployment rates at a record high and the official, understated poverty rate at about 40 per cent, Detroit water bills are unaffordable to a significant portion of the population.

The City of Detroit declared bankruptcy in the summer of 2013. A high-priced bankruptcy lawyer was named its Emergency Manager with a mandate to get the city back on its feet financially by imposing a savage austerity regime. within the United States. Noting is off the chopping block, including water utilities, which are being considered for regionalization, sale, lease, and/or a public-private partnership and are currently subject to mediation by a federal district judge. The Detroit People’s Water Board fears that authorities see people’s unpaid water bills as a “bad debt” and want to sweeten the pot for a private investor by imposing even more of the costs of the system on those least able to bear them. The service cut-offs for anyone more than two months behind in payments appear to be the city’s last-ditch attempt to make up for lost revenues. A contract with a private operator seeking profits will only lead to greater hikes in service fees and even less affordable, more unjust barriers to equitable access to vital water. That this massive human rights atrocity is occurring near the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet, with very little media attention, is a foreboding sign of the times.

The Michigan Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO) argues that these water cut-offs to poor Detroit households need to be understood within a broader context of Detroit’s appeal in the real estate market. With its proximity to the Great Lakes and the Canadian border, the city is considered prime real estate, and is available at fire sale prices. People’s overdue water bills are being transferred to their property taxes and people are losing their homes as a result. Given the utility’s lack of interest in cutting costs or generating revenues by collecting on the arrears of business users, fixing leaking pipes, and cutting off services to abandoned homes, the organization sees the crackdown as a ploy to drive poor people of color out of the city to facilitate gentrification – what the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization refers to as a “land-grab.”

Barlow writes of residents who cannot bathe their children and who have no water for cooking, no water for sanitation. She writes of parents fearing the loss of their children due to child welfare authorities acting on state policy there by working utilities in all homes housing children.

It is a nightmare. Imagine living in a society where the poor cannot secure access to clean water. This isn’t some impoverished failed state. It’s the United States. If it can happen there, is any place really secure?

More On The Harper Contempt For Democracy Act

If twisted autocracy is not your political cup of tea, please consider signing this petition sponsored by The Council of Canadians in protest of the misnamed Fair Elections Act.

As well, please consider making a Call For Democracy to your local M.P. today sometime between 12:30 and 6:30 P.M.

You may even wish to invite your Facebook friends.

CETA - Part Four - Trust No One

Ultimately, the critical thinker has an obligation to educate him/herself. To simply accept government 'assurances' that all is well is to surrender the responsibilities inherent in being a citizen in a democracy.

HARPER SAYS: CETA and free trade deals do not allow foreign investors and foreign companies to challenge Canadian laws and regulations.

WE SAY: NAFTA’s chapter 11 protections for foreign investors have allowed corporations to challenge dozens of Canadian laws and regulations simply because they interfere with profits. Canada is the sixth most sued country under the investor-state dispute settlement regime, which exists in around 3,000 bilateral investment treaties globally. Those corporate lawsuits have attacked environmental assessments, the failure to get approval for unpopular or environmentally dangerous quarries and dumpsites, measures to reduce the use of pesticides, research and development payments from offshore oil and gas production, the way hunting and fishing licences are distributed, and local content quotas in Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Canada has had to pay out or is on the hook for over $200 million in settlements or losses to investors under these extreme investor rights which countries such as Australia are now avoiding in their trade deals.

HARPER SAYS: CETA has been the most open and transparent trade negotiation in Canadian history.

WE SAY: So why did it take the government three years to try to explain the agreement to the public? The fact that the provinces are negotiating a trade deal for the first time says nothing about transparency since the provinces are being even more tight-lipped than the Harper government. There have been and will not be any opportunities to see or modify CETA before it is signed, perhaps as early as this winter. Once it is signed, the Harper government will block attempts to modify it in parliament. This is the antithesis of transparency. If CETA and agreements like it are supposed to be 21st century or “next-generation” free trade deals, they should be negotiated in 21st century ways — openly, transparently, and with broad public input.

CETA - Trust No One - Part Three

Here are two more CETA myths being perpetuated by the Harper regime, according to the Council of Canadians, that we should be aware of:

HARPER SAYS: Free trade deals like CETA do not prevent governments from regulating standards that protect the public, including in the areas of the environment, labour, health care and safety.

WE SAY: CETA and free trade deals like it are designed specifically to limit opportunities for governments to introduce new rules and regulations that have an impact on trade and investment flows, even if the intention of the rules was to protect the environment or public health. The United States has just lost three World Trade Organization disputes involving meat labelling, a ban on flavoured cigarettes to discourage smoking among children, and voluntary measures designed to protect dolphins from tuna fishing. CETA and other trade deals include language on avoiding new regulation as the best and least trade-distorting option. CETA will provide Canada and the EU with tools to frustrate or delay the introduction of new standards. It will give corporations the right to sue governments in the event that regulations interfere with their profits.

HARPER SAYS: Canada’s FTAs do not force governments to privatize, contract out or deregulate water-related services.

WE SAY: European member states are so concerned about how CETA might affect their ability to deliver public water services that they have proposed to exclude drinking water from their side of the bargain. With only one exception in Yukon, federal government, provinces and territories have not asked for the same protection for water services, which leaves Canada’s public water systems vulnerable to claims by the EU or its large private water companies that their investment opportunities are being undermined either by local water monopolies, or, where there is already some level of privatization, by new water use or other standards.

Free trade? Everything about the CETA deal carries a very heavy cost.

CETA - Trust No One - Part Two

As reported in today's Star, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after meeting with Stephen Harper, has promised to push for early completion of the gruelling negotiations for a Canada-European Union free trade pact.

While that may hearten those who believe the pact would be an unalloyed blessing for Canada's economy, there are many others, including Canadian municipal governments, that are not so sure:

HARPER SAYS: It’s a myth that CETA would prevent Canada’s municipal governments from sourcing goods and services locally.

WE SAY: The procurement rules in CETA will prohibit any covered government or public agency from preferring one bidding firm over another based on the amount of Canadian or local content in the goods or services that firm is offering. Already procurement, or public spending, is open and transparent in Canada. Already European firms bid on and win major construction and other projects. The only thing CETA does is lock municipalities into one way of spending, where the lowest bid wins every time. It means giving up the right to use procurement as a sustainable development or job creation tool.

Wayne Easter, the Liberal Party's critic for International Trade, expresses similar misgivings about CETA in an article for iPolitics.

CETA - Trust No One - Part One

As I get older, I sometimes feel like a character from the X-Files, one of the recurring motifs of which was "Trust No One.'

I think I have lived long enough and read widely enough to know that things purported to be the truth are often the exact opposite. Such is the case, I believe, with the Harper government propaganda surrounding the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement CETA) currently being negotiated.

While much has been written about it, it has a relatively low public profile, and even lower public understanding of its implications, thanks largely, I suspect, to the kind of breathless endorsement of its 'potential' from the MSM, including The Financial Post.

Happily, as always, there are organizations that challenge this rosy depiction, not the least of which is The Council of Canadians.

While the full piece is available at the above link, I am going to post parts of it tonight and tomorrow in the belief that small amounts of information, especially when read online, are more readily digested than large ones:

In April 2012, the Harper government launched a propaganda campaign in response to growing criticism of the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). The campaign material, housed on a new DFAIT webpage , attempts to respond to several claims about CETA which the government believes to be myths. Unfortunately, in answering these claims, the Harper government introduces even more misleading and even false information about the impacts that “next generation” trade agreements like CETA will have in a number of social and public policy areas.

HARPER SAYS: Canada’s free trade agreements exclude health care, public education and other social services maintained for a public purpose.

WE SAY: Public pressure forced the Canadian government to seek better protections for health care in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but CETA could undermine those protections. As private, for-profit activity increases in health care, education and other social services, it’s not clear a trade or investment panel would agree that these are services “maintained for a public purpose.” As proposed by Scott Sinclair , senior trade expert with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada should negotiate a new exemption, modeled on the cultural exemption in Canadian trade deals, which assures that nothing in CETA “shall be construed to apply to measures adopted or maintained by a party with respect to health care, public health insurance, public education and other social services.”

More to come tomorrow.

Maude Barlow on the Election

While I have been having a bit of a difficult time recovering from the double blows of the Harper majority and the apparent apathy of 40% of my fellow Canadians in their failure to vote in last Monday's election, I took some comfort in reading Maude Barlow's thoughts in a piece posted on rabble.ca.

Check it out if you need some reasons not to abandon all hope.

Maude Marlow On The Dire Implications of A Pending Trade Agreement

Scanning the Globe's website, I read an article by Maude Barlow, National Chair of the Council of Canadians, regarding a trade agreement that could further erode our sovereignty. NAFTA-like in its scope and mechanisms, the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) would accord to European business entities many of the same rights Americans enjoy to sue Canada over, for example, environmental laws that affect their ability to conduct business. No wonder the Harper Conservative Government has been so secretive about these negotiations, given how the pact, if ratified, will give it a further excuse to do nothing to address our environmental concerns.