Primer on Investor-State Dispute Settlement
In light of the latest NAFTA Chapter 11 decision to go against Canada, I was asked to put together some background notes for our Unifor leadership on this bizarre quasi-judicial kangaroo courtsystem....
View ArticleTPP: Renegotiating NAFTA, By the Back Door
For years, trade and justice activists have proposed renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement to address some of the deal’s most damaging features: for example, by removing the...
View ArticleElection 2015: An Escape Hatch for the NDP?
In an earlier post, I sought to explain (not necessarily defend) the Mulcair team’s decision to run balanced budgets as an election campaign tactic to counter being branded by the Conservatives (and...
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Some missing elements from the Canadian TPP debate
With an agreement reached on the Trans Pacific Partnership, the 12-member trade and investment treaty, opinions began swirling about what the deal means for the future of Canada. Plenty of facts have...
View ArticleNAFTA: Suddenly, Everything’s on the Table
For years, we’ve been told the dictates of globalization, and the intrusive and prescriptive terms of free trade agreements in particular, are immutable, natural, and unquestionable. When workers were...
View ArticleNAFTA and Labour Rights
I recently spoke at the Standing Committee on International Trade on their study “Priorities of Canadian Stakeholders having an interest in Bilateral and Trilateral trade in North America, between...
View ArticleUnwarranted Gloom and Doom: The IMF on Canada and NAFTA
To read the media today, one would think that NAFTA is a keystone of Canadian prosperity and that renegotiation could lead to a national economic disaster. That view has already been rebutted in a...
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Stephen Clarkson: An Introduction to a special blog series
Stephen Clarkson: Political Economist with a Global Vision (1937 – 2016) Marjorie Griffin Cohen and Daniel Drache Stephen Clarkson died early in 2016 in Freiburg, Germany and Canada lost someone very...
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Ontario Electricity Sector VI – Meet the new boss…
The provincial election of June ended 15 years of Liberal electricity policy in Ontario. Anger over high electricity prices continued to be an election issue, contributing to the Liberal loss of power...
View ArticleIs there life after NAFTA?
Like all sensible folk I was myself opposed to the NAFTA at the outset, convinced that it did more for the corporations than for the rest of us. I’m still of that view. Is it possible that the...
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