CETA Widening the Gap between Both Sides of Atlantic?

Germany may push back the signing of the long-announced Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada, as it calls for the removal of investor protection clause from the deal’s text.

Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the centre-left SPD in Germany, noted yesterday while speaking before the German Parliament that “the chapter regarding investment protection is not approvable,” adding that “the last word hasn’t been spoken yet”.

Senior German official Uwe Beckmeyer told The Globe and Mail in Ottawa that sections of the deal allowing private companies to sue governments – known as investor-state provisions – must be changed.

The European Commission, on the other hand, denied reports on potential derailment of the deal.

Ahead of today’s meeting of officials on both sides to finalize the agreement’s text, over a hundred social organizations on both sides of the Atlantic are launching a joint statement “denouncing the outrageous democratic deficit that surrounds the negotiations of CETA,” and rejecting an agreement that “grants excessive powers to multinational companies at the expense of people’s rights.”

“With one voice, we reject any attempt by Prime Minister Harper and his European counterparts to place our societies and parliaments before afait accompli. The stakes of this agreement are such that we can not accept a handful of technocrats decide our future without a public debate can be held”, said Pierre-Yves Serinet, coordinator of the Quebec Network on Continental Integration (RQIC).

According to RQIC, the consolidated version of the text, leaked in mid-August 2014, confirms the concerns expressed by the organizations: excessive rights granted to investors, inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, further liberalization of services and inclusion of provisions that limit the power of government to regulate or to remunicipalize public assets, dangerous burden on peasant agriculture, regulatory cooperation mechanisms that will bypass the monitoring of democratic institutions.

“The promise of CETA creating thousands of jobs is a sham. This agreement will have a severe negative impact in many sectors of the economy, as will be the case in the Canadian Maritime Industry where thousands of Canadian jobs will be eliminated by weakening and abolishing the Cabotage Laws in order to open domestic trade to foreign carriers”, said James Given, President, S.I.U. of Canada and Chair of the Canadian Maritime and Supply Chain Coalition recently created to oppose CETA.

Workers Uniting, the global union of the United Steelworkers (USW) in North America and UNITE the Union in the U.K. and Ireland, also condemned CETA, saying that the deal will  “challenge regulations that protect health and safety, workers’ rights and the environment”.

Fears that CETA may hamper Canadian short-sea shipping have also been voiced, by Canadian Shipowners Association (CSA). CSA said that Canadian seafarer jobs might be jeopardized should the agreement go forward as it is.