TPP Supports Jobs in the North say BC Liberals
Prince George, B.C. – Prince George MLAs have thrown their support behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement.
Billed as one of the largest and most comprehensive trade deals in the world, the provincial government passed a motion of support of Canada’s ratification of it on Thursday.
“If this agreement were to go ahead without Canada, B.C.’s job creators, exporters and manufacturers would be cut off from selling competitively to millions of new customers around the world,” says Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond.
“This agreement is vital to the success of the B.C. Jobs Plan – opening up new markets for B.C. exports, creating new jobs and driving economic growth here at home.”
Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Mike Morris adds the agreement will create new opportunities for forest companies by expanding existing markets and developing new ones throughout the growing TPP region.
“Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand currently have tariffs ranging from 2.6 and 40% on B.C. wood exports like spruce, pine and fir lumber, originated strand and plywood.
“These tariffs would all be eliminated over time – making B.C. forest products more affordable for buyers in member markets.”
An NDP motion in the Legislature calling on the government to consult with the public on the TPP prior to supporting it, failed.
Comments
Never met a politician that wouldn’t wrap their legs around any old tootsie roll that came along, but they should really investigate the downside of this snack before they latch on.
Selling out Canadian sovereignty isn’t my idea of serving the people. Just funny that way I guess. All comes down to whom you’re really trying to serve and who you’ll deliver up to do it.
Hey Mr. Blow. How in the world does a trade agreement that enormously expands the market for northern BC products constitute ‘selling out Canadian sovereignty’?
If you’re running a lemonade stand at the end of a one-way cul-de-sac you’ll get a few local customers – the Smith family, the Martin family and the Cooper family, but only because the cheap-ass Coopers felt shamed into buying a 50 cent glass of juice.
If you’re running a lemonade stand on a busy, two way road you get the Smiths, the Martins, the Coopers, the Nelsons, the Changs, the other Smiths, the Horblatts, the Fitzpatricks, the Cloughs, the McLeans, the Gibsons, the Mortlands, the Greens, the Ryders, the Watsons, the Veitchs, etc. etc.
It’s called the global economy.
Clearly you haven’t read the agreement or even read about it, nor do you seem to know anything at all about investor state agreements. If you did, you probably would have saved yourself the time of writing your little anecdote and making yourself look like you’re not very bright.
Investor state agreements are dangerous to national interests. I suggest you start reading up before you write anymore silly nonsense.
I can’t seem to reply to Mr. BJ’s comments so I’ll post my reply on a higher tier.
There’s no problem with intelligence at this end buddy.
Protectionist economies get exactly what they deserve – a bunch of economic islands that eventually whither because no one gives a sh*t about your lemonade stand.
Huff and puff and blow the house down but if nobody knows about us, or the products we can supply to the world, we’re an economic island too.
Oh yeah, I can see you’re a real rocket scientist VOR, babbling on about something you clearly know nothing about. Not to mention your inability to figure out which way to assemble my initials. Dyslexia is a terrible thing and that at least can be excused, but intransigent ignorance cannot. Next.
Correct me if I’m wrong, and btw I’m neither for nor against the TPP at this point, but it’s my understanding that ‘investor state agreements’ simply mean that governments can’t arbitrarily change the rules without penalty after they’ve attracted foreign investment and these changes then negatively impact the previous attractiveness of that investment. So far as I know, our system of law provides protections against the seizure of private property by the state unless adequate compensation is provided the owner of that property. And the amount of this compensation is negotiable, to a point. The power of expropriation remains with the State, however, and so there is no way a private owner can hold out for an unreasonable amount of compensation. Ultimately a Court would decide what’s fair. But other countries don’t necessarily have similar laws to ours. And if those countries want reciprocal investment in them by Canadians, wouldn’t there have to be some agreement about ‘fairness’ if the government there changed its mind and decided it was going to just take what had been invested and none of the projected returns were allowed to be realised?
Yes you are wrong Socredible.
You are under the erroneous assumption that national laws and norms apply under TPP. This is a treaty that supersedes national law in that it gives all interpretation of disputes to the City of London secret tribunals that have the power to financially penalize national governments for national laws… and even over rule the Supreme Court of Canada.
TPP rules out any government involvement in the economy. Any exceptions for areas like education, health care, and infrastructure can quickly be overturned through the investor state resolution process by which Canada will have no control and through a slippery slope of TPP precedent by dumb politicians each will be privatized under the threat of financial penalty from the City of London investor state resolution tribunals.
In essence democracy will become nothing more than a place for social policy that has no impact on the economy what ever is left. Democracy will have no control over anything else… much like soviet satellite states, or EU states today in monetary policy.
Our system of law and the protections it provides through magna carter and precedents based rule of law does not apply under TPP. The process and even the rules are not open to the public. No court decides whats fair; only an unaccountable secret tribunal of insiders.
This City Of London Arbitration tribunal was established in London in 1883, during the time when Britain was determined to somehow maintain its colonial Empire. Has it been chosen to be the dispute resolution body for TPP issues?
Do these Agreements not have ‘escape clauses’, Eagle? It’s my understanding that NAFTA, for instance, can be cancelled by any of the signatories to it on six month’s notice. IF things are as bad as you say, (and in the States both Trump and Sanders seem to agree with you ~ both citing job loss), why don’t any of the negatively effected partners just pull the pin? We could put a tariff wall around us and produce everything here we’re now importing. Just how we’d afford to be able to buy it might be another question, but there certainly would be SOME manufacturing jobs created, no doubt about it. Of course, there might be considerable job loss, too. Since those countries to whom we’re now exporting are going to erect tariff walls on their borders as well. Stuff we now sell them competitively won’t be as competitive anymore. But at least we’d have our ‘sovereignty’ back, wouldn’t we?
Socredible talks about “escape clauses” in an agreement… kind of like the China – Canada FIPA where the escape clause is actually thirty (30) years? Thats right, Canada is locked into that agreement with China for a minimum 30 years… some escape clause huh? Thanks Harper Conservatives!
Socredible writes, “And if those countries want reciprocal investment in them by Canadians, wouldn’t there have to be some agreement about ‘fairness’ if the government there changed its mind and decided it was going to just take what had been invested and none of the projected returns were allowed to be realised?”
Look at China today. they have the FIPA agreement that gives them reciprocal rights to investor state resolution process, but good luck ever drawing large amounts of capital back out of that country. Capital in China is largely locked into China through strict capital export controls.
The idea of reciprocity is great, but rarely ever happens in practice between first world countries with strong rule of law, like Canada, and third world ‘political economies’ with weak corruptible judicial processes. Sure they will play along while it benefits them though.
The greatest way to ensure reciprocity is having a strong national economy and through bilateral agreements that respect national sovereignty. The idea of ‘enlightened sovereignty’ through global trade agreements surrenders in large part the ability for a country to enforce its own trade reciprocity.
TPP is crap. The same rhetoric was spewed for NAFTA and soon as it passed logging and forestry went for a shit and so did a lot of other businesses. Since the early 90’s and NAFTA all I hear is bad news about our economy. TPP is no good. Just another way to drive out small business and make the cost of living higher than it should be.
If you think too many north american jobs went offshore with NAFTA, wait until you see how many we will lose under this agreement. This is nothing more than a get richer scheme thought up by business and those politicians in their pockets.
Its all about greed and nothing about trade. Protect the 1% and all their greed is what this is really all about.
I’ve seen it predicted that 50% of all the existing jobs in North America are going to disappear over the next half century due to advances in technology. Seems that just might happen, when you consider that in 1900 half the total workforce was engaged in agriculture trying to grow enough grub to feed themselves and everyone else who wasn’t. That’s down to about 3% of the workforce now, and we’re growing more grub for more people than ever before in history. Countries like China, where famine was a regularly recurring feature of life, are now food exporters. So if this is happening, and I don’t think there’s any doubt it is, (we only need look at the Lakeland mill that’s just been constructed to replace the one that blew up, where there are fewer workers than before, but the production per man per day is higher ~ and that’s just one example, nobody ever builds any new plant where productivity is lower than it was in the plant it replaced, not willingly anyway), these jobs you’re so worried about losing are disappearing anyways. Seems to me that all NAFTAs and TPPs are going to do is try to rationalise what we do best, but that still isn’t going to create enough jobs to make up what we’ve lost. And if we went the other way, and got out of all these agreements (they do have ‘escape clauses’), and did everything here to replace what’s done elsewhere now, and imported here, would ALL the wages of all these jobs be enough to BUY ALL the production from them at the costs of its making?
“This agreement is vital to the success of the B.C. Jobs Plan – opening up new markets for B.C. exports, creating new jobs and driving economic growth here at home.”
but I thought LNG was going to do all that and more ???
This signing of the TPP deal is simply outrageous. Since when did they get a mandate from the people of BC to sign away our sovereignty? Since when have they ever had a public debate on this issue? And since when have they even read the agreement themselves before signing the agreement as it is still mostly secretive and in flux?
This is a sell out of the highest order by politicians eager to sell out those that voted for them so as to get the perks of the top 1%. They obviously don’t understand class warfare and economics, or they just don’t care and do as they are told to vote.
TPP is about privatizing public capital in the name of monopoly capitalism and about setting up a duel hierarchy of law that separate private elite capital from the accountability of public democracies and the legal framework of national constitutions. Its about the 1% having all the power and the rest of society paying them rent in perpetuity.
I have always been for ‘Free Enterprise’ as a vehicle of leveling inequities in society through the notion of a meritocracy where we are all granted equal opportunity protected by the rule of law.
These politicians continue to mouth ‘free enterprise’ values, but are all hat and no cattle when it comes down to policy. They are in fact all for ‘monopoly capitalism’ of the global elite and perpetuating long term inequities of dynastic wealth over and above the labors of the working class.
Capitalism at its simplistic sense is in fact R>G with R=Returns, and G=Real Growth in the economy. In the long term returns can never be greater than growth without the capital class attaining an ever great and great share of capital in an economy. Eventually owning everything and everyone.
The 1% pay less taxes per dollar of revenue than the rest of us, and yet they average over 2% more growth then the average economy… year over year this consolidates all capital more and more into the 1% as taxation fails to account for the consolidation of wealth in the macro economy in the hands of fewer and fewer dynastic foundations of wealth that are becoming so consolidated that the few at the top now feel they need to set their own rules. This is what TPP is all about… using tax and labor arbitrage on an international scale to more and more consolidate their grip on production of wealth and thus gain total control of the economy and the power that comes with it.
Money can’t give birth to more money limitless and thus incur increasingly larger shares of national income in fewer hands bearing no relation to the actual production of society. Those that don’t work and contribute to actual production shouldn’t get to inherit and accumulate so much wealth based on nothing but the vagaries of finance and international capital tax avoidance.
Finance as a share of GDP use to represent less than 10% of the economy and now represents the vast majority. This masks the fact that the real economy has been gutted over the last 40-years and real wages have declined despite annual pronouncements of year over year ‘economic’ growth. The whole fiscal monetary system is a ponzi scam fraud of the elites wages on the working middle class.
Signing TPP accentuates global capital inequities and provides legal protections for a global elite to protect their place over society. It is designed to enforce regressive policies across vast swaths of policy unrelated to global trade and in doing so build up walls of protects for those that benefit from monopoly capitalism.
We not only need to stop TPP, but we also need to push for a progressive wealth tax on the 1%.
The 1% love the income tax. They absolutely love it because that is a tax for the labor class and not for them. The 1% can hide wealth in their holding; they can get paid in stock options taxed as capital gains; and they can design the loop holes to transfer their income off shore into a black hole of tax shelters in off shore companies and accounts.
Funny thing is some of the poorest household incomes in BC are also some of the richest real estate markets in the country. They get it all and pay very little in taxes and these are the patrons of the BC liberals.
I say tax the wealth and abolish the CRA as it pertains to income taxes. Stop taxing free enterprise for employing people; and stop taxing properties regardless if they are wholly owned or wholly financed by the bank.
We need a progressive wealth tax of 5-10% with no off shore shelters where they can hide their wealth.
Property taxes came about as a result of a need for land owners needing to protect their investments by registering their properties to accrue the legal protections of the state and the rule of law. So to should it be for large scale capital accumulations.
When the 1% have to choose between registering their wealth and paying 5-10% a year (5% over a million in wealth, and 10% over a billion in wealth – on a progressive scale)… when they have to choose between paying their taxes to protect their wealth and having no legal protections of their wealth they will register their wealth voluntarily for taxation.
This is what needs to happen; or we will all be working for ‘the man’ as minimum wage slaves… and our country will be nothing more than a sock puppet for the global elite.
NAFTA was a toothless tiger when it came to “free trade” in forestry products, but now these sock puppets are telling us that an agreement negotiated in secret with the participation of transnational corporations is going to be good for for forestry products from Northern BC. God, these people think we are stupid; although, considering they keep getting re-elected, there ma be empirical evidence supporting why they think that.
The softwood lumber agreement was actually a separate agreement from NAFTA, in other words excluded. It became an endless wrangling at the WTO and other legal bodies, costing Canada dearly. How the Mulroney government got persuaded to sign such a thing is still a mystery to me.
Which is my point. NAFTA was supposed to prevent just the sort of thing as the SWLA; however,as soon as American lumber was uncompetitive against the Canadian industry, supposedly the point of Capitalism and “free trade”, we had to sign an agreement making us less competitive which is why companies like Canfor went on a buying spree in the American industry.
“Free trade” agreements are a farce as NAFTA proved, but no we have these know-nothing sock puppets feeding us the same old myths about the “benefits” of free trade, except this time it is the Transnational Protection Plan.
Canada wanted softwood lumber excluded from NAFTA. And many other things. The other signatories agreed. So we have what we have. On six month’s notice any of the signatories can cancel the deal. If it’s so harmful, why have none of them done so?
These trade deals are simply efforts to delay having to correct a larger problem. NO modern, industrialised country can consume ALL its own production, no matter how efficient it becomes in producing it, and fully pay for it at the financial costs of its making from the total amount of incomes distributed to worker/consumers in the course of making it. NONE OF THEM. Trade deals are an effort to ‘rationalise’ production. Which they do do, for better or worse so far as ‘sovereignty’ is concerned. But the underlying problem remains. And largely negates the advantages. It won’t matter whether we’re in them, or out of them, so long as that problem remains untouched we’re going to be on the short end of the stick.
The USA could be internally self-sufficient in softwood lumber if it chose to manage its National Forests to the same level of forest management that its lumber producers already manage private forest lands there. If it had gone that route it wouldn’t need any lumber imports from Canada, or elsewhere. It’s WE who need their market, more than they actually need our lumber.
I am very worried on the real impact we will see from the TPP.. Money has already been put aside to deal with the fallout from this..that is never a good sign..and what DONT we know yet???
The TPP is a steamroller! The BCNDP is going through the usual opposition motions again. A provincial referendum would have cost a pile of money and the outcome would have had zero impact on the TPP negotiated by Harper and the eventual signing of it by Canada.
I understand that if the agreement is not ratified by all before 4 February 2018, it will enter into force after ratification by at least 6 states which together have a GDP of more than 85% of the GDP of all signatories.
How do you know that any kind of referendum would have had no effect?
This thing still has to be ratified. What exactly is the process in Canada to determine whether it should be ratified?
The ‘eventual’ signing of it by Canada? Harper is not PM anymore, so what makes this eventuality so certain now that your boy is holding down the job? Ah, yes, the REAL power behind the Liberal Party. The traditional party of the debt dealers, and what’s good for High Finance is good for….
I don’t think it would be to wise to have Shirley and Mike tell us what a good deal it is for all of us. BC jobs plan another joke.
If you want to have jobs there has to be consumer demand for the output of those jobs, and some way of making that demand, if and when it actually exists, EFFECTIVE. Even if we had everyone who could work working, and being paid by their employers whatever is supposed to be a ‘living wage’ (now), the total amount of all those wages paid out would NEVER add up to the total costs of everything produced over the same period of time that flow through into prices. So if the country closed its borders to all imports and exports and tried to be internally self-sufficient in everything, it still couldn’t SELL all it was making to its own citizens at the financially accounted for costs of its making. And the same thing would happen if the whole world was one big global village, with free trade access to all markets anywhere. The problem is with how the money system actually works. And that’s what needs to be corrected.
‘Not to mention your inability to figure out which way to assemble my initials. Dyslexia is a terrible thing and that at least can be excused, but intransigent ignorance cannot’
I called you a blow job you idiot.
I see Eagleone is calling for a “wealth tax”. I think this is akin to what used to be called a Capital Tax. It was levied on the wealthy in Britain in the inter-war years. The Banks in Britain loved it. It forced the wealthy to borrow against their ‘wealth’ ~ most of which was held in assets VALUED in ‘money’, and not ‘money’ itself. If they were productive assets, the cost of borrowing to pay the tax was simply added on the price of the products being produced. And if those products were destined for home consumption in Britain, British consumers paid the tax. Impoverishing them further. If the products were for export, the tax raised the prices of those exports, and British industry quickly became non-competititve internationally and stagnated. And we wonder what happened to what was once the “workshop of the world”. Of course, those Eagle loves to hate, the Rothschilds, for instance, weren’t really too disadvantaged. They were bankers. And bankers have the power to create money, to pay taxes, as well as for anything else.
Comments for this article are closed.