Ottawa Citizen: Don’t celebrate this (Buy American) deal

Canada has given up too much and received too little in its negotiations over ‘Buy American’

The Buy American breakthrough announced by the Harper government yesterday is anything but. Canadian companies have secured very little new access to U.S. public infrastructure spending and at a large cost to public policy space for Canadian provinces and cities. It is an ideological rather than an economic coup for a government whose real goals are weakening public services and reducing the role of government across the country.

“Buy American” policies are entrenched in U.S. history, dating back 75 years. President Barack Obama’s most recent conditions, which require that the steel and other materials used in infrastructure projects funded by federal recovery money be made in the United States, are only the latest example of spending preferences that show up in highly popular state and municipal procurement rules. They are a rational, and from most accounts successful, economic development strategy that Harper would have been wise to promote in Canada if his goal truly was creating jobs and wealth.

Instead, we get a blindly ideological adherence to “open markets” at all costs. Stephen Harper is trying to convince Canadians that by including the provinces in the World Trade Organization’s government procurement agreement, as trade minister Peter Van Loan announced yesterday, Canadian suppliers will get sweeping new access to contracts to which they were previously excluded by these Buy American conditions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A recent Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report explains that this will not get Canadian businesses access to federally-funded mass transit or highway construction projects, which the U.S. has exempted from its WTO commitments. They cannot supply public utility services such as telecommunications, nor will they have access to contracts by the 13 states which have made no commitments at the WTO.

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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/celebrate+this+deal/2529076/story.html

For the find Tuvor.

It is now our task to bring this item to our municipal and provincial reps.

The CBC 6 o'clock radio news it appears that the deal is not signed yet. The US is allowing Canada to celebrate but are not talking about it.

At this point it appears to me that we are running scared. We are worried about what might come, and adhering to the Chicago School of government. Charest and McGuinty better smarten up quickly.

Seems like another soft wood lumber case by our New Canadian Government.

And it isn't just us, it involves a lot of other countries.

Obama is anti-protectionism and so am I.