Trade Agreements
Déclaration Parti communiste du Canada à l’occasion de la Fête du Travail 2015
7e septembre 2015
À l’occasion de la Fête du Travail 2015, le Parti communiste du Canada envoie ses salutations les plus chaleureuses de solidarité aux travailleuses et aux travailleurs à travers le pays, en particulier à toutes celles et tous ceux qui sont engagés dans des luttes contre les attaques des employeurs et les gouvernements de droite.
Save Canada Post
This statement is from our June Central Committee meeting. View our earlier campaign leaflet text here.
The Harper Government’s unilateral decision to eliminate home postal delivery, escalate postal rates and eliminate up to 8000 jobs is a major part of the agenda of privatization which targets all social services, publicly owned resources, energy, Medicare, education and transportation.
In order to expedite negotiation and implementation of the CETA agreement with the European Union the federal government early in the process made a commitment to the European negotiators to comply with the conditions of the Lisbon Agreement (the de facto constitution of the EU) which calls for the privatization and expropriation of all public services and resources. Privatization to comply with trade agreements is a method to bypass parliament and the Canadian public.
Block the CETA deal!
Every government and advocates of “Free Trade Agreements” have dangled the illusion of jobs and prosperity. These have never materialized. Indeed the opposite is true. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have vanished through NAFTA, and experts predict at least another 50,000 jobs will be lost through CETA, the latest and most dangerous of these agreements.
Shrouded in secrecy, the Harper Conservative government, the European Union, and major trans‑national corporations recently concluded the final round of negotiations for the largest free‑trade agreement in Canada’s history since NAFTA. Although there have been setbacks in the German Parliament over the dispute mechanism, the Harper government are still pushing for a signing, at least in principle, in September 2014. CETA would take effect after it has been ratified by the EU member states, and also by the federal and provincial governments of Canada. This makes the fightback agenda very urgent; just as the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investments) was defeated, blocking CETA is still possible, through a strategy of mass mobilizations and by making this sellout a key issue in next year’s federal election.