Renegotiating NAFTA deal

U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear that he thinks the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been a bad deal for the United States.

He has called Canada and Mexico to the table to renegotiate the deal. President Trump wants to put “America First” in NAFTA, or walk away from the deal.

For years, we have seen the ravages of NAFTA — the Chapter 11 corporate lawsuits that have cost Canada millions of dollars and eroded our environmental and public policy, hollowed out manufacturing towns and hundreds of thousands of people put out of work, and greater inequality in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

The Council of Canadians — Canada’s leading social action organization — is calling for three major things to make NAFTA a fairer deal:

1. Eliminate Chapter 11, the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process.

ISDS provisions give corporations the right to sue the Canadian government, often for millions — even billions — of dollars, if any public policy or government action denies them investment or profit opportunities.

2. Remove all references to water as a good, service or investment. Canada is vulnerable to bulk water exports and increased water privatization with this NAFTA rule.

3. Eliminate NAFTA’s energy proportionality rule. This rule requires Canada to export a lockedin percentage of our energy production to the U.S.

This means more production in the environmentally destructive tar sands, which will stop us from our climate commitments.

Betty Wilcox, Stanhope,

Council of Canadians,

P.E.I. Chapter