Activists to protest Atlantica

This article gives a little more detail on the conference and the objections of protestors. It is from a Halifax newspaper.
Activists prepare to protest against Atlantica concept

By PAUL EVEREST




After gearing up for a year, protesters are ready to descend upon Halifax next week to voice their displeasure with a controversial conference on regional trade.

From June 14 to 16, roughly 500 business, labour and community representatives will gather at the World Trade and Convention Centre to discuss the Atlantica concept, defined as a united economic trade zone encompassing the Atlantic provinces, parts of Quebec and the northeastern United States.

Atlantica has drawn criticism from Canadian unions and activist groups because it promotes the interests of big businesses and deeper ties with the U.S. Last June, hundreds of protesters crashed the inaugural Atlantica conference in Saint John, N.B., and several people were arrested.

This year, protest organizers are expecting as many as "a few thousand" people to rally against the conference and promote the message that Atlantica will only hurt Eastern Canada.

"It’s an extension of this neo-liberal trade agenda that was set way back with (the North American Free Trade Agreement)," said John Price, a spokesman for the Halifax-based Anti-Capitalist Collective, which is helping to organize the protest.

"It’s the neo-liberal alphabet soup of deregulating services that working people have fought and struggled for for a long time. Things like minimum wage. Atlantica plans on lowering minimum wage."

Anti-Atlantica activities kick off this Friday when a petition signed by those unhappy with the conference will be given to conference organizers. Mr. Price said it’s expected this petition will be rejected and that a "spicier" petition will be put forth.

He was unable to say what the second petition will entail.

Mr. Price said there will also be protest-related events across metro between June 14 and 16 including a family-friendly picnic, a fair-trade coffee sack race, similar to a potato sack race, as well as a bike ride.

The protest will climax with a march outside the convention centre on June 15.

Proponents for the Atlantica concept say it will act as a portal for international trade that will only help boost local economies. Trade barriers will come down and regulations between Canada and the U.S. will be harmonized.

It’s expected Premier Rodney MacDonald will use this year’s conference to promote the Atlantic Gateway concept as a regional priority, while the Atlantic Provinces Chambers of Commerce will announce the creation of a business leaders council to focus on potential business benefits.

But Mr. Price said he questions whether conference delegates really have the people of Atlantic Canada in mind, especially since the Halifax conference is being held behind closed doors with a $600 entry fee.

"There’s no transparency, there’s no accountability," he said.

( peverest@herald.ca)



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Saskatchewan and TILMA

TILMA is the Trade Investment and Labor Mobility Agreement. The Conference Board figures show great benefits for BC but the data and the technique for calculation of benefits were as this article points out quite suspect. Critics worry that these agreements are part of deep integration with the US and curtail the powers of municipalities.

Saskatchewan and TILMA
Posted by Erin Weir under TILMA , economic models

Today, the Government of Saskatchewan initiated a process of legislative consultations on TILMA and released the Conference Board’s assessment of this agreement’s potential impact on Saskatchewan. This document is the sequel to the Conference Board’s BC assessment, which Marc and I critiqued on this blog and in our paper.

I have not yet read through the 55-page document, but will provide some initial impressions. The Conference Board has retained its matrix of industries and regions, but dropped its GDP-impact scale in favour of simply treating the final “score” as a percentage of GDP. This “methodology” is still completely arbitrary, but produces appreciably less extreme results. Whereas the Board projected gains equal to 3.8% of GDP and 78,000 jobs for BC, it projects 0.92% of GDP and 4,400 jobs for Saskatchewan. These Saskatchewan estimates are still unbelievably high, but also so dramatically different from the BC estimates as to constitute a repudiation of the Conference Board’s previous work.

Interestingly, the provincial government has released the Conference Board’s document in conjunction with other materials. Brian Copeland’s excellent paper, which Marc and I cited and which used to only exist in hardcopy, is now available online. The government has also provided reviews of the Conference Board’s assessment by two academic economists, Dr. John Helliwell and Dr. Eric Howe.

The following are some key quotes from pages 6 and 7 of Helliwell’s piece:

“The principal source of data for the paper was a survey that asked representatives of firms, organizations and government agencies and departments to list what they thought to be the most important barriers to inter-provincial trade in their company, region or industry, and then provide qualitative rankings of winners and losers by region and industry. The latter were then converted to measures of long-term changes in income and employment by Conference Board staff. Since there was no research or quantitative base for this translation, it has no empirical basis, and hence cannot be treated as evidence. . . . In my view, this is an inappropriate use of the survey instrument, akin to estimating national GDP by asking households how they think everyone else is doing these days. . . . there is no empirical support for the Conference Board estimates of GDP and employment changes.”