good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show and just before we start will mention that c h o y a as you may have heard on the station earlier today will be going into its spring fund drive starting next week this is the time when we ask you to support us in continuing to bring you programming that's difficult to find anywhere else and in some cases probably impossible to find anywhere else we don't get paid marjorie stewart's in the studio with me here today good morning marjorie marjorie and i don't get paid most c h a y programmers are volunteers but we rely on the support of a very small staff who do need to be paid and there are many other costs involved in keeping a radio station on the air for example so i think that's the society has something to do with canada that's that's how musicians get their royalty their royalties for their recordings and we have to pay fees to them in order for that to happen so that's just one of many things that the station has in the way of important critical expenditures in order to keep going so we are grateful for all of the support we're grateful for vi you student fees but they only cover part of the station's operating budget and listeners like you make up the rest so tune in next week to find out more about how you can help you fact you can even look at the web site right now c h o y dot ca and it has information there meanwhile marjorie you have a guest here in the studio tell us what you who will tell us about your guest and about what you'll be general community activist if there's anybody who can explain to us what's going on in terms of the latest massive global trade agreement so called trade agreement it's seventh or eighth of april eighth friday evening seven pm at bone park and it connects to very very important themes whistleblowing and the so called trade agreements and  the council of canadians is putting this on free although i'm sure they will accept donations they they're obviously intending to put together the two two people who can give us a great deal of information about both these  and one of them is our own paul manley who will be interpretating the transpacific partnership between the us and nearly everybody else who has any money on the pacific and who is a veterinary scientists who has had various battles as a whistle blower with health canada who are supposed to be looking after our health but seem to be more intent on looking after corporate interests so that if next friday is the reason we wanted to talk about those two issues today and for a poll in particular we want to get his expertise about this trade agreement because it is so huge and s cunningly crafted by so many very highly paid lawyers behind closed doors that it's very hard for people to get a grip in football i understand is it forty nine p cent of canadians have no opinion on the they're not sure what it what it's all about i just want to mention that brenda sayers is going to be speaking thank you event as well and she's been at the forefront of fighting the can of the china dream at the foreign investment promotion and protection agreement that allows chinese state owned corporations to sue the government of canada when it puts in laws or policies that get in the way of chinese investment in this country and i guess bring the nation's point of view too absolutely so that's going to be a very exciting event next friday and i advise people to mark some point we'll make mention of ways to find out a bit more so that you shadow cabinet for the green party and that was a position i took on when i ran last year and it's something i've carried on with it's an area that i've been studying for almost a decade now since two thousand and seven i've been a octave ist for a couple of decades but really digging into things like investor state since two thousand and seven when i started working on my first film about trade you really what you mean the p but the security and prosperity partnership another acronym that you try to make people aware of and that's that's a role that you step into very neatly they're very lucky to have someone who has already done the previous where and already knew the issues in the field i'm sure you're finding many new aspects with that particular new role it's like hopping into an ocean yeah i often think of those guess it doesn't create a conflict of interest some some community interests to create conflict with political engagement but at this point the council of canadians and the green party have quite a lot in common  o have to say that i'm participating in this in this event in a nonpartizan way so i'm there as a filmmaker that's working on investor state agreements in a film that i've been you know developing over a number of years i've done one case study for it i was on the national board for the council canadians and i was on their trade committee for that campaign and i stepped aside from that board last year when i stepped up political race i'm no longer a politician i'm a recovering fall that we have i hope i'm still involved doing research on trade investment for the green party and speaking out about it  did a four page assessment of the team based on the choppers that i read and the analysis that i'd seen about those chapters so hugely in depth agreement so it's pretty complicated i don't think anybody could master the information that's in there it's fifty six hundred pages long it covers a wide variety of very specific specialties that you would you know people study their whole lives you know like copyright inflectional property or agriculture or finance you know all the different aspects of trade and it's an legal language that's very obfuscating and difficult to understand unless you know how it can be interpreted and various aspects of the economy from from high tech to to farming saying this is not a trade agreement this is an agreement to protect corporations to give corporations more power and i'd like to hear you explain briefly what they that other alphabet soup thing is about investor state dispute it's not really investors is it really means people with a lot of money yeah the investor state dispute settlements are key to these agreements the first investor state dispute settlement was in nafta the north america free trade agreement and it's been you know and that's the provision that allows corporations to sue governments for laws and policies that get in the way of their profitability and the key terms in there are things like national treatment indirect  expropriation to people no one in direct relation means that's you know we understand what director procreation means that means when when the government takes an asset you know to build a highway or whatever but indirect expropriation means when the government uses laws or regulations or policies that prohibit something that a corporation wants to do or inhibits them from you know fully profiting the way that they would like to profit and then they can sue using that took the sunlight off their house would th mike i guess so yeah that would that would be something like that i mean the the classic case that i think everybody can understand is tobacco giant philip morris suing the governments of  australia togo you know too for plain packaging on cigarette packs you know so that the government of australia said that they wanted to put take all the glitzy advertising off of cigarette packs and just put and that one of the australians won on a technicality so it didn't go through the whole process the one with a is is still in process and they've been threatening to go with the same and the process behind closed doors and a small number of people who don't owe any allegiance to we the people yes they're there to decide in tribunals arbitrary arbitration tribunals where three lawyers get together and these lawyers have a vested interest in this process because they can shift positions one arbitration tribunals they could be representing the corporation the next one they could be the  could be representing the government and they're very highly paid to get up to a thousand dollars an hour plus and these processes take a while and they're decided in places like the exit the international center for settlement of investor disputes which is in post in the world bank in washington and they follow this set of rules the the tribunals are secretive so we don't see you know the process the whole process until after it's it's done we'll get the ruling and there's different rules based on the trade agreement so some of them are a little more open than others but they follow these these rules that are set by exit which have a basic set of rules people are waking up to this in countries around the world so the europeans modeled on the seat of the comprehensive economic trade agreement between canada and the european union which also has investors stayed in it and when they started to become aware of what was going to allow for american corporations to do in europe the german the french and the spanish they all started saying we want ratify this agreement with investor stayed in it so now they've come up with a compromise which is that there's an appeal process but the appeal process is based on the rules and interpretation of the same rules the exeter control rules and compromises so it was interesting because it you start off with two positions and the stronger position while the other position to compromise so they have to move towards them and then the strong opposition wants the outside to compromise so they have to move this is giving away rather to isn't it compromise with corporate interests before citizen or or customer interest yes for just rendering sovereignty and the thing about this is that europe and canada but have you know judicial systems that are well established they're part of our democratic system why do we need a private arbitration system to determine disputes between corporations and governments why can't we use our judicial system to do that if we have these advanced judicial systems and we're you know organizing trade then we should be able to use those judicial systems to work a trade  disputes you know there's there's a whole number of problems with the way that investor state is being used to undermine government decisions and you know gus van harden who is a trade expert  good haul in tronto has outlined this and he was he was seen in a report that he wrote before the last climate change conference in paris that that investor state could be used and the the transfer of power the buying of power there was a deal for that and so they you know it was it was a subsidy to combat climate change to to make sure that there was more renewables used that there was less we've just had a similar thing in ontario when you say they lost the whole of india lost yeah the government of india lost and that whole thing about elevating corporations to the level of a nation is relatively twenty first century and i show my years here but in the twenty first century it seems to me that people don't pay any attention at all to recent history or to history of any kind they think that they have to reinvent  in my opinion in some cases it's being done very badly time was when you had to have permission to sue your government but these corporations are being elevated to a state by state at which they can start to suit against a national government that's new yeah and this was one thousand nine hundred four with the introduction of nafta and chapter eleven of nuff to and some people don't fully understand how this process works i was  you know on a panel discussion in a presentation down in duncan and somebody was present there and they were they were talking about how their small company twelve employees was having trouble with with a big corporation i can't remember which one and they were thinking that this investor state would help them in a similar style dispute the future but that's not the case because number one they have to have an office in korea number two korean law that was prohibited them from the same kind of level of engagement in the economy that you're panasonic in korea and the other thing about these these disputes is that they take millions of dollars to  fight these lightly although they do in order to you know if they've got lots of money to throw around they do in order to change public policy and to intimidate governments from carrying on with good public policy going back to the example of cigarettes they're threatening to go with investor state dispute millions of dollars of of you know lawsuits against them to the national coffers yeah so they come forward to ever say you know to wealthy corporations it's not just national government see this it i mean the city of could attempt to do something about climate change  trumps survival then any corporation that felt its interests were affected could roll all over us under some trade agreements the it's the pro e provinces are creatures of the federal government so one province is an act legislation they can they can trigger suits that are suits against the federal government and see the other subnational agreements of this provinces have to sign on to cedar in which case anything the municipal municipalities do or school boards or regional districts or anything is a creature of the provincial government can trigger those those kind of disputes the world and want to see the signs we have also have rules that hopefully will be undone by the liberal government public private partnerships that were put in place by the government that mean that makes it impossible for a municipality we know there's been so much contracting out done that the local responsibility local government responsibility for various parts of their enterprise their public  enterprise has now been privatized but a lot of us expect that our school board r r r r city council will actually have employees and will do certain work and that's being economic development within our community so we're going to pay a little bit more for this company within the nih mo to produce these things for us we have to open it up to competition for you know whoever signed in on the trade agreement  in the case of the t p p a could be you know made in vietnam and me when i were there the labor standards are much lower i think that we all of us need to have a look at how many corporations  lives because we know the names of the corporations in some cases that they come across as something very benign that's part of our life that we are addicted to but we have to chile maybe sit down and make a list every time we think of a corporation that we've just bought something from or that is part of the services that we're using we have to look at that and pointer how much power we want these corporations to have over our individual lives because  information age they can really get out assault quite easily and quite quickly with legislation as opaque as this legislation is now the the wonderful jim hi teller who i go to when i'm feeling down in the dumps because he always has a way of expressing himself that makes you a huff as well as see what is going on he has said he's had some very interesting comments to make about  first of all he introduced me to that marvelous comment from the public citizen woman corporate it's got nothing to do with improving well it's three of four chapters through four bits on improving international trade but really it's about making life easier and cheaper for corporations while the young to twenty six different chapters to them how to do with bringing down barriers to trade the rest have to do with constraining government well  similar is happening today in our glorious land anyway according to hightower these people promised quote the glories of globalization unquote they corporations got the gold we got the shaft thousands of factories closed millions of middle class jobs went south and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities standards unquote as most are that's in the u s so let's hope at least as good as the u s could be ruled as illegal trade barriers and then he goes on to point out later on that the investor state dispute resolution which you've been talking about the i s d n or elevates thousands of private profit seeking entities to the legal status of sovereign nations cases are decided by cook behind closed doors i'm just reiterating this so that people really get it behind closed doors by three person international tribunals of private attorneys who often have a glaring corporate bias the same lawyers who represent corporations at least he says routinely switch over in other cases to service quote judges unquote as who told us paul holy revolving door he says these tribunals  accountable to any electorate and their decisions are final there's no appeal to a real court if a corporation wins a crace case taxpayers of the government being sued loose for they must pony up cash to compensate the corporation for it profit so it's the corporations against us and in pain for paying corporations to not do something i mean what better than to not have to do anything to get paid for the potential profit of something that you thought you wanted to do i mean that's just you can you can come up with outrageous proposals and buy off individuals in a government and get them to agree to something then later on have another go government to says that's ridiculous we don't want you know we don't want a protection racket with a with an appeal tribunals of cronies absolutely and tell us a little bit about the people who did have access to the preparation of the p p this corporate interests and none of the public interest groups yeah no it's corporate interests and civil society organizations labor organizations environment organizations are not at the table and are not part of the negotiation or the discussion so it's very much a corporate driven process i remember you know when i was doing the film s p p that there was twenty corporations representing three countries this was knocked on steroids  based companies but the rest of them were branch plants and they're the ones that were deciding so these are multinationals that are deciding you know what the trade rules work how they're going to shift how we're going to change our regulations harmonizer re gulations between the three countries and if they have the clout to open an office in a country that's a platform for them to screw that country they generate to make some announcements is out well this could be a good time i suppose well we're trying to absorb this information which is pretty scary we will just remind our listeners that you're listening to c h o i want to one point seven f m you are a student listener supported campus and community station based in downtown and imo but heard of course on the internet at c h o y dot ca wherever you may happen to be just another mention that c h o y will be starting at spring fun drive next week and change is going to have a couple of special programs over the next couple of weeks next tuesday traviss going to bring some clips on the latest from a recycling conference in california that he attended  recycling has always been part of changes and it's always quite fascinating to find out what some of the the really new ideas are so he'll be talking about that and on april twel a series of brief interviews on the subject of radio its future and why it is still important i think that is going to be most interesting so april fifth april twelfth and justin will be with them because i won't be here so do tune in to to hear those no events in parksville in kuala come the brandt festival continues until april seventeenth the events include wildlife uing adventures nature art and photography a bio blitz guest speakers and loads more there's something called living on the edge biodiversity of estuaries and coastal habitats this saturday april second two to four pm when biologist and restoration technician karen barry will speak about amazing as two areas and coastal habitats at the park's phil museum and archives for more information on the festival including all of the events and to find out what a bio blitz is see brant festival dot b c dot ca and finally april eighth brings us a chance to find out more about this transpacific partnership that we're talking about paul manley is our guest on the show today and paul we could go over the details again about what's happening april eighth and you were going to mention some web resort as well where people could go to find out something what to do what to do how how we can become engaged in dealing with this issue yes so the the event the keynote speakers chopra who blew the whistle on bovine growth hormone in the proposal to put that in milk  in canada and the reason why this is tied to the t p peonies doing across canada tour is because we're going to be allowing under the t p up to three and a half percent of our milk supply to be coming from the united states and it is just going to be mixed in with our milk supply and there will be no labeling and so we could have bovine growth hormone mixed in with our milk with no idea that it's being mixed in so that's a key concern for or for shift he's a biologist and you know work for the department of health and when he blew the whistle on this he was fired so he's going to be speaking brenda sayers going to be talking about her experience going up against the fee per agreement the count of the china which was ratified by stephen harper and his government to not that was not a trade agreement so it didn't have to be ratified b parliament it was an investment agreement so that's a different a different beast and i'll be talking mostly about investor state but looking at some of the other chapters and in the tepee that i've looked  motive yes yes now the other part was you mentioned that there's so website people can go to to get instructions on how to communicate with the federal government because when i was looking things up i see that we have until the end of this month at least at the time the article i was you know what i don't have the web address but i posted it on my facebook page on my personality page so if you just search paul manley you'll find it on my personality page you find it on my on my personal page and you'll find it on the middle island comedians  as well right over the course mentally is spelled m a n l y you know for anyone who hasn't noticed and that's a tool that was created by by a number of organizations including the council canadians and some of us stand up and it what what it allows people to do is to create your own custom letter based on on things that you're concerned about specifically or use the template letter and it's loaded with information about why you should be concerned about the d p p so it's it's a tool that is really simple and quick if you want want to be simple and quick or if you want to dive a little bit deeper and customize and really do a little more research on what the problem with this agreement is and there's a lot of problems with this agreement and depending on what your what your interests are open media is is part of this group as well that's put this tool together and open media  people may or may not know has been fighting to keep you know things like net neutrality fighting copyright extensions fighting the into law property rules that are going to constrain the internet dot's part of this whole agenda as well with with parts of the agreement making internet service providers the police of copyright on on the internet and that means you know your kids or my kids sharing stuff online that they don't have control copyright ownership ownership of and that and that could be as simple was taking an image off the internet putting some text on it  posting it on facebook that's copyright infringement and people do it all the time for the purposes of fair comment or satire or other things that are that extended and it's it's a threat to and that's where the pharmaceuticals come in and that takes me to the whistleblowers because the first whistle blower i learned about  in toronto and she was being pressured to approve a drug for the profit of large pharmaceutical corporations to for  canada and she refused she wasn't happy with the study she thought the study was flawed and she was set well but may sound just slightly interesting it gets i think more colorful when you learn that that case in canada by our government department against somebody trying to look after our health interests was the subject of john the carries the constant guard ne vindicated despite everything her career was changed forever she was kicked out of her job by our appointed representatives responsible to our elected minister of health and not too long thereafter came the case of shift chopra and a couple of other veterinary scientists and they were not happy about the possible impacts of bull fine growth hormone they weren't sure they didn't see any proof that there would be any impact on humans but what we often don't talk about is that everybody knows there are very severe impacts on cattle from the use of bovine grow but it's even where in the dairy situation where they're they're injected with with hormone and hormonal interference in order to produce more milk so chopra and these two hormone and possibly of the big agriculturists who want to make more money by forcing coast to produce more milk than they naturally do were considered to be more important than the health of canadians so he's a fighter and he fought it but unfortunately he's also not a canadian canadian he's an east indian canadian and he later when a case for racism against his employers when he was able to prove that there were racist elements to the fact that they sacked him because he wasn't quite their kind of person so it's going to be very interesting he must be quite elderly by now because this was back in the ninety's i think if not before so there are various aspects of whistle blowing that are directly applicable to corporate interest because that's what whistleblowers do they get in the way of the corporations and then they're the first people they're the front line of defense and if our government and if our employee or don't look after them then we're screwed so that's the reason that there's he this huge connection between his experience fighting the sort of in direct pressure from the pharmaceuticals the past had the ear of various people in ottawa in order to be able to bring that trying to put canadian out of a job because they wanted to import us and of course the big deal was the b g h because there are a lot of people out there that don't want that stuff in there and they're trying to assuages yeah we don't have it in canada to this day is that right that's right it's still illegal in canada but there's some very sneaky language and the kind of sneaky language that says and any of the cheeses beyond that you have to wonder where the milk solids twente to make those cheeses came from so we're already sort of slightly up the creek here ok you know impose a label the mandatory labeling of g m o's in products or two to stop new g m most from coming into the country you know further so that that could all be  considered trade impediments and disputed using investor state and then twenty years later the science comes out to them they say oh we made a mistake but it's too late they've made the money and they've gone somewhere else and they're doing something else so that's one of the council canadians is absolutely opposed to the t p pm and for numerous reasons but the investor state settlement is key to it but also the this whole  of international trade is is a boat it's not about lifting all boats because it's a it's a race to the bottom and it's about exploiting resources it's about exploiting labor  or you know these things are prohibited or banned and there's no teeth to it so that you know corporations governments can can have locks environmental standards and there's no there's no so going back to then with putting enough to the climate change agreement that we had with kyoto kyoto there was no sanctions involved without so that's why can't the can just walk away from it well let me just put this train of reason as opposed to so you know environmental policy and it is locke's the labor standards it's the same thing it's it's suggestive rather than prescriptive it doesn't tell you know what they have to do so you know the the labor standards you have to follow international labor organization rules which say you have to have you know minimum wage for example but it doesn't set what that minimum wage minimum what we used to call the bottom yeah so vietnam could have a minimum wage that's pennies per hour and there's a whole series of problems with this but that the cracks open you know that the choppers that it's included crack open a whole bunch of other other issues and other problems like there's a financial chapter in it that basically says that a company or countries can't regulate financial instruments that aren't about the economic collapse of two thousand and eight yeah you know financial instruments that are basically casino chips and the way that our bank was regulated you know when they deregulated in the united states c would be obligated to follow the same kind of regulatory process as other countries and when new financial instruments are introduced somewhere else and accepted in other t p p countries we have to accept them here so do we know what the liberal government's position on the t p p is they just signed it didn't they and i was listening to our new minister of international trade and development on the radio the other day and she said we just love free trade process of public engagement so they're trying to you know before it's ratified it's been signed but now there's a two year period where it has to be ratified and it has to be ratified by eighty five percent of the economies involved with japan back so to the united states back to back so don't count the box of it's not a big deal because we don't amount to too more than fifteen percent yeah the us can pretty well swing it all though it does cover i understand forty percent of world trade it's a p p covers that amount of money but remember this is not money but his going to trickle down i read an estimate that canadians earning under eighty eight thousand dollars a year would not benefit from the income generated by increased trade from the t p p how would that be what we're going to see more manufacturing jobs leave ca meeting states that's been been lowered to forty five percent so that you could have a vehicle where fifty five percent of it is made in china and the other forty five percent is me even caring about it would be a meeting of the vehicle about multinational corporations and she said the problem with multinational corporations is that they can they can move the most sensitive parts of their enterprise to the safest places and i'm sorry to say that my home country of scotland was one of the safe places where they put to sensitive computer innovations to be to be made because they thought that they would get any trouble from the workers there so there are these peculiarities of the agreements that that just keep piling up i just want to read a little bit about the spokesperson for made sense so frontiere because if there is if everybody doesn't love made sense so  said we have raised our force as loudly as we can repeatedly warning that this is a terrible deal for access to affordable medicines ministries of health humanitarian groups and global health programs all rely on affordable medicines to provide medical care but despite repeated warnings from m s f and other concerned experts and groups and even other negotiating countries u s negotiators have pushed for provisions that benefit pharmaceutical companies  expense of the more than eight hundred million people who need access to affordable generic medicines in current countries and the list that she attributed to problems with the d p p were the same list that you see on the council of canadians website it's the green party website it's the public citizen website every single group that see self as a public accountability and a public service organization i assume the unions are equally bothered although the economists are apparently harvard economists and yes nuff to has been very bad for jobs in the united states he was of course in the in the united states nafta has been very bad for jobs in the united states but we needn't worry about that anymore because most of those jobs  comp companies shopify the black berry founder jim balsillie paul krugman economic commentator bill moyers who as we all know takes these things very seriously and goes in deep and my beloved jim hightower who makes you laugh at the same time has he explained so there is no question there are tremendous problems involved here for people are waking up to it and there's been there were there was a lot of activity leading up to the signing of the agreement a month and a half ago and organizations are really building momentum around getting people educated about it and i think you know we've seen in other countries people are hitting the streets we haven't seen that in kind of the so much yet but in new zealand and australia there's been huge demonstrations and in other places so we need to to work on building awareness here in cannes of the were sold this idea that free trade is going to open up markets for us we're going to be able to solve more of our natural resources but  and he's speaking from a u s perspective they stopped clinton's demand for fast track authority in one nine hundred ninety eight and i don't think obama got away with fast tracking this one either we sidetracked the multinational on investment that like it was going to steamroller right through in ninety eight we derailed expansion of the world trade organization in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine and again in twenty ten we defeated the free trade area of the americas a fourteen nation attempt at the t p p with eighteen pacific rim countries sac for south africa malaysia and thailand the only way that the powers that be can win is to keep the public in the dark about what  is and the only way we can do that is the only way we can fight against that is to know what we're talking about a bit we don't have to understand the whole thing but we do need to know why we and people in the in the states were using it to educate people with the p v p and they encouraged me to make a film about the t p p and i decided i'm not making another film about another acronym trade agreement so i'm doing a film about investor state which is the common denominator in all of these agreements whether they're investment agreements or trade agreements and i'll be talking about the heart of the presentation paul manley thank you so much thank you marjorie for bringing paul in the end that's our show we'll just mention once again let's talk t p dot ca which is where you can go online to make your comments right here and on behalf of our production team thank you so much for joining us