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No, without NAFTA they'd have one. US courts can allow the US to tax, subsidize, and discriminate away against canada with impunity, if NAFTA wasn't around.

   

Yes, I know I feel so ashamed to have even thought I was anything but the court jester and to even think that Canada should have reign over her own domain. Silly me! Goats do that.*faints*

Toro, I can not help but feel cheated by such a glib analysis. Fair enough let the games begin...

You have made clear we have won every case except one in a decade. I have also made clear the damage and the time it has taken to come to such 'justice' that fundamentally begs the question of the validity of the court in the 1st place. Deep pockets have time on their side, care to suggest as to what country has more millionaires and billionaires? Ever heard of the term looting? Is this court nothing but a kangaroo one? We win every time almost but we will never be out of court. Do you ever wonder why innocent plead guilty?

Canada post is a crown corporation in charge of a very basic service that keeps remote areas of this far flung country in communication. It must operate in communities that operate at a loss in order to serve the public. It can be replaced, so too could the RCMP as well as fire departments, sewage treatment plants and schools even the military! Privately owned and operated franchise could run them all but as a public utility to deny it access to markets that provide it with profitability is an attack on an institutions that is a service to the people who pay for it. Also, it makes the whole enterprise more expensive to run. Perhaps I could make an example, let's say you live in an area that have severe storms, would it make sense to have a private company in charge of emergency response? As they would find no profit in keeping their equipment static they would undercut standards, perhaps give resources to other departments as from a company standpoint they are not being used and thus could be making the company money. When the storm does hit there is nothing to help with, it is all gone but now people are dying because of that lack of vision.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailedi ... E01&irec=0

Remember reading about this?

What are the arguments against the wheat, dairy and egg boards? Who are making them? Who pays for their shares? What country are they from? This is called follow the money as someone who talks about it at such length I am sure you could find this out.

http://www.newfarm.org/features/0303/ne ... dies.shtml

Now remember this one? This is what GATT on a global scale could be. It must however be a level ground to inspire results like this:



What FTA, NAFTA, and FTAA are doing is reinventing the wheel. There is still time to scrap it and get back to the GATT and the grow the GATT to all countries and all goods to all markets. In opening more markets the current members markets cost to produce drops as well they gain more areas to sell to. WTO is just an old boys club that is just not cool to be in and never was. I would like to say to Canada it is time we took our marbles and took them home to play with a much larger market. The US will come and trade with us on the terms of the world market.

Lastly a correction, I never said NAFTA and RIM were connected, I said the fate of Canada and RIM are connected. Patent court and the kangaroo trade court of chapter 11 were running in parallel and not in sequence and it was in tandem that their fates are sealed.

With NAFTA unilateral trade actions are not on the table. We can't stop anything anymore and I must ask who owns it then if not the people with the deepest pockets?

   

Actually, what I said was that Canada has only lost one case in a decade.

As for resources to launch legal action, these lawsuits are brought forth by private interests against the government. The government has unlimited power to tax and thus have far more resources at its disposal than any private interests. Shareholders will not allow corporations to waste resource by going on quixotic legal fishing trips. As for private millionaires and billionaires, these people aren't stupid. If they see that they will lose almost every time, they're not going to waste resources continuously losing in court.

One should also differentiate between the softwood lumber industry and those suing for compensation under NAFTA Chapter 11. The softwood lumber industry is essentially fighting for a good portion of its existence as opposed to UPS, which is a growing company. Those fighting for their survival react differently than those who are not, which explains the American lumber industry's (and the American steel industry's) continuous challenge to trade deals the US has signed. A company like UPS benefits from trade deals - even if they lose this case - because they are treated without discrimination in the countries in which they operate.

Also, again, I'm not a lawyer so I'll defer to the lawyers in the crowd on legal strategy, but what has been happening in softwood lumber is that the timber industry has been challenging Canadian imports in American courts based on American laws and being adjudicated with American judges under different auspices of American law (which Canada would be much more vulnerable to if we scrap NAFTA). The nature of the challenges by companies suing under Chapter 11 is different since once the panel has ruled against UPS and the appellate process has been exhausted, UPS cannot challenge in NAFTA using the same grounds, ie. that Canada Post is using its monopoly power to subsidize Courier.

Finally, its interesting how you frame the adjudication panel as a "kangaroo court" Scape. (Which it is not.) If anything, since Canadians seem to be pretty successful, one could argue its a kangaroo court stacked in Canada's favour! And that's bad how?



It is not going to be replaced. Canada Post will continue to operate. Remember, this is about Courier, the fast-delivery package service, and whether or not Canada Post is using its monopoly power to unfairly subsidize Courier to the detriment of other companies.



This, again, is exaggeration. This is not going to happen because NAFTA does not disallow government from providing services to the public.

Chapter 11 (read it if you are bored or want to become so) does not allow for discrimination against foreign corporations. If a government is going to do so, then compensation must be paid, which is fair IMO. Governments should not have the right to expropriation without compensation.



Setting aside the efficiency of private and public organizations that Scape refers to (its usually not the public enterprise), I'll respond by saying that I can find many, many examples in developing countries where government has failed to offer those basic services due to corruption and/or incompetence. Using Scape's logic, because of gross incompetence and corruption of government services in developing countries, we can only conclude that all government services in Canada are also corrupt and incompetent and thus we shouldn't have government run services in Canada. Or are we making a false analogy?



Well, what rulings under the WTO and NAFTA have gone against the marketing boards then? Frankly, I'm surprised that the WTO ruled in in favour of Canada since the marketing boards seem to be such a distorting structure.



Right, more free trade in agriculture. I'm all for it.

You've posted another thread that subsidies falling are a good thing, which I agree with. It also makes agriculture more productive. But then you defend the marketing boards, which is an implicit subsidy. Are subsidies good or bad then?

For the record, "GATT on a global scale", "GATT" stands for Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. GATT already was global.



These agreements are trade pacts with stronger adjudication processes, which benefits smaller nations like Canada.



Though I disagree that we should scrap it, I'll give Scape credit for acknowledging what economists have known all along - that free trade benefits nations, even if Scape and I disagree on what the structure of free trade agreements.



Tonga becomes the 150th nation to join the WTO a few weeks ago. Some old boys club. The critics must ask themselves that if the WTO is so bad, why are so many countries a part of it - more than the GATT?



Canada will be subject to more disputes like softwood lumber and Canada will have less leverage when trying to settle these disputes.



In a court case brought forth by an American corporation against the Canadian government, the Canadian government has the deepest pockets.

   

You argue GATT is global and yet your also saying WTO is better because of superior membership. Redundancy in government is called waste, redundancy in trade agreements is no different. It could also be labeled a subsidy. Imagine for a moment that to trade on the global market you must 1st have membership in one pact that then allows you membership into Y agreement so that you can access Z market. This is the game of trade set up under WTO and it is not one that favors the poor but is set up by the rich for the rich. The WTO is middle management and it is nothing more than a tax. Once we entered into the era of FTA membership to WTO became a must for trade. Than membership comes at a high price as it demands control over resources on its terms.


I have a bridge to sell you if you think that is the truth. When taxpayers compete vs the corporate interest it is always costly and the winners are the ones who don't have to be in court in the 1st place. Go check to see if the softwood tariff is still being collected and see how that, right now, is robbing jobs out of the market. IF emancipation comes, the jobs have been long gone and the industry is but a shadow of its former self. The objective of dragging us through the courts all along.



Wrong. Let's say for argument that we disband Canada post and then try to recreate it under the current pact. We could not do so as it would directly compete with industry and the government of Canada would be sued for such action. The only reason Canada post is not disbanded under the current pact is that it was there 1st so it is being grandfathered out by the death of a thousand cuts that UPS represents.

   

No that's not what I'm aguing Scape. I'm not saying that the WTO is good because it has more members. Rather, I'm saying there are more members because its good.

I still don't know why 150 countries, many of them poor, would be part of an organization that is so bad for them?

   

Soviet satellite states were not exactly eager to be communist. It was the only choice available. The WTO is the only game in town if you want access to the market. It's like once a girl knows she is pretty she can become a major bitch. The WTO is becoming more dominating the bigger it becomes.

   

We don't do business with the US . We chicken shit ! A dollar is a dollar regardless what side of the border you're on . What exactly are canadians so afraid of . We dictate to our gov. so much that we will take 60 to 80 cents on our dollar what are they supposed to do for us ? NAFTA IS psycho and that first post makes no sense of any sorts . Sorry nothing personal , just my opinion.

   

You can still access the market Scape. Its just that you are more likely to pay tariffs. Even such, the majority of trade outside of agreements is tariff free.

   

   

   

WTO is access to markets, on their terms and disbanding subsidies. However, Owl makes the point that it once your hooked on WTO it's next to impossible to get off. As the WTO levels the trade field it also puts droves of middle and lower class out of work in the process, hugely unpopular for domestic issues. This is the weakness of globalization, as the WTO does this there is a backlash and WTO does destroy long standing careers.

If global access to markets is so readily available why have bodies like GATT? Making universal the unconditional most favored nation principle was the bedrock of the agreement. The genius is in the simplicity and it should have stayed with that. As GATT evolved it tried to become more than its original purpose and lost its way as the changes it demanded became more radical between its most favored trading nations causing massive change within those nations AND making those nations even more inaccessible to non-member nations. This is an enormous mistake. The focus must be on opening markets to as many as possible, not creating elite cliches that cater to their own and have become hopelessly dependant upon one another and that dependency becomes a means of control and ultimately grounds for resentment.

   

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