[KevinGagnon]

NAFTA= North American Free Trade Agreement.

I don't have allot of knowledge about exactly how NAFTA works, accept for some parts of it.

If you read David Orchard's book "The Fight For Canada" he gives a more in dept explenation about each part of the agreement that most hurts Canada. David explains it much better then I can here.

Kevin

[Im4Canada]

Hi Shid87, January 1994 Canada, U.S.A. and Mexico launched NAFTA - North American Free Trade Agreement. The prior trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. was the FTA - Free Trade Agreement signed in 1989.

[N Say]

Yeah it's a trade agreement between Canada, the USA & Mexico. Off the top of my head, the problems people have with it are:<BR> 1. "national treatment" - we have to sell our resources to the USA & Mexico for the same price we sell domestically. This is a problem because we have to sell our stuff really cheap.<BR> 2. "Chapter 11" - if a corporation, foreign or domestic, can show that an action of the government cut into their profits they can sue the government directly for loss of profits AND FUTURE PROFITS(!) So our government can't block a takeover usually can't nationalise anything. It's also a problem because democracy is undermined. Basically the decisions are made by corporations now because they have the right to sue governments directly. So we have to stand by and allow the country to be bought up, can't enact publicly-funded no-fault auto insurance & must lower environmental standards to match the USA & Mexico, among other things.<BR> 3. dispute resolution - before NAFTA a neutral 3rd country adjudicated our trade disputes, now we're just 1 on 1 with the US & the NAFTA panels made up of corporate lawyers & trade reps operate in secret, where they can't even be seen<BR> 4. ~90% of our "trade" is with the USA, which makes our economy very dependent on theirs.<BR> there are others, check out the reports put out by the BC government in 1993:<BR> <a href="http://www.leg.bc.ca/CMT/35thParl/cmt04/1REPORT/cmt04.htm">here</a> & <a href="http://www.leg.bc.ca/CMT/35thParl/cmt04/2REPORT/cmt04.htm">here</a>

[sthompson]

Here is a NAFTA backgrounder I put together a while ago. This has links and basic info that explains it in an easy-to-understand way. <p> <a href="http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php?page=20030516151947517">NAFTA backgrounder</a>

[xdeathx10]

In plain english NAFTA is an agreement where tarrifs were dropped on trades between Canada, US, and Mexico. This is an upgrade from the FTA which was just between Canada and the US. Prime minister Mulroney signed this agreement.

[no1important]

NAFTA really only benifits America not us.

[FootPrints]

An old article, but a good one.<br /> <br /> The Corporate Rule Treaties<br /> <br /> by Victor Finberg <br /> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> <br /> Free trade. That might invoke images of top-rigged schooners plying the high seas, freely trading cargos of local surplus grain with silks and spices from exotic lands. In fact, free trade is neither free nor trade. Free trade is about making it easier for employers to get cheap labour and resources, and about expanding markets to sell more product. But these days, "product" very often just means money or something that represents wealth. <br /> <br /> Canada is involved in a number of free trade agreements. Some already exist and some are only proposed. Are these agreements beneficial to Canadians? If they are, it might be acceptable for the people of Canada to go about their lives and let the government worry about issues of national economic policy. But if the agreements are harmful, then we had better wake up and ask why our government is acting against our interests. <br /> <br /> The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) took effect January 1, 1989. I wasn't paying attention at the time. Many people were awake; in particular, the organization called "Citizens Concerned about Free Trade" (CCAFT) had been in existence for four years. They are more than concerned: they are fundamentally opposed to free trade. And it could be argued that the 53.5 per cent of Canadians who voted against Mulroney's Conservatives in 1988 were opposed to free trade, which was the main election issue at the time. I suppose that there are those who would argue that, in the 1993 election, the 98.7 per cent reduction in the number of Conservative MPs did not mean that Canadians hate free trade. I am not one of those people. What is beyond debate is that the Liberals campaigned against free trade in the 1993 election. However, shortly after getting elected, Chretien's Liberals expanded the FTA into NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. <br /> <br /> Canada's government has no mandate to impose NAFTA on the Canadian people. Mulroney signed NAFTA and was kicked out of office. And Chretien campaigned against it! As for Mexico, the Salinas government is openly reviled and maintains order only by murdering their political opponents. Well, I could be wrong. Maybe the Mexican people love their government. After all, the ruling PRI party has been elected continuously for the past 80 years. <br /> <br /> The various free trade agreements which our governments are imposing on us against our will are not neutral. They are having and will have major effects on our lives. Of course, some people will benefit from these agreements, otherwise they wouldn't exist. But they contain economic policies that will cause most of us serious harm. <br /> <br /> For example, the FTA and NAFTA state that Canada can not screen new American investments. Yet, even before the FTA, Canada had the highest level of foreign ownership of any industrial country in the world. Each year, $35 billion of profits and interest flows out of Canada. That's about double the national deficit! Even if you know nothing about economics, you might suspect that there's something wrong with letting our wealth pour out of the country like that. But in fact, it is easy to demonstrate that foreign ownership is a fundamental cause of Canada's economic problems. <br /> <br /> The FTA and NAFTA state that Canada must treat American investors the same as Canadian ones. No level of government in Canada can give preference to Canadian companies over U.S. companies. Nor can we require U.S. companies operating in Canada to hire Canadians or purchase supplies locally. <br /> <br /> The FTA and NAFTA state that Canada must continue to deliver natural resources to the U.S., even if Canada faces a shortage. These resources include minerals, various fuels, and water. That agreement to deliver might be feasible if the U.S. demand were only a small fraction of the Canadian supply. But the U.S. is currently consuming more than half of Canada's annual gas and oil production. The National Energy Board expects that our entire known gas reserves will be extinct within fifteen years. That's soon enough that I bet that everyone who is reading this will be around to witness it. <br /> <br /> There are other nasty aspects to NAFTA. You can read the clauses and think about what they imply. Or you could just look around you. In the first 3 years of the FTA, Canada lost 1.4 million jobs, including over 25 per cent of its entire manufacturing sector! The Fraser Institute argues that there is no correlation. I think there is a direct causal link. I think that the government officials who signed the FTA and NAFTA have committed deliberate acts of violence against the Canadian people. <br /> <br /> Well, maybe free trade isn't so good for Canada. After all, our standard of living is way too high. And if we're losing jobs, surely Mexico is gaining jobs, and that's good, right? Wrong! The average hourly wage paid by U.S. corporations in Mexico is 63 cents. The invasion of Mexico by American and other foreign corporations over the past decade has driven Mexican wages down by 60 per cent. Competition with American agribusi-ness is destroying Mexican farmers. NAFTA required the removal of Article 27, the land reform guarantees, from the Constitution of 1917. Put it all together and it should not be terribly surprising that NAFTA has caused large numbers of Mexicans to rise up in open, armed rebellion. <br /> <br /> There is one good thing about NAFTA. It has a termination clause. Canada can withdraw at any time, without penalty, simply by giving six months notice. I say that those six months are three years overdue. <br /> <br /> These days, free trade agreements seem to be proliferating as rapidly as rats. If you read any publication that actually tries to inform people about important issues, you've probably heard a great deal about APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Anti-People's Exploitation and Coercion) agreement. APEC is free trade involving half the world, if you count it right. I won't say much about APEC here. However, one thing new about APEC is the scale of the human rights abuses the member countries engage in. Look, for instance, at Indonesia. According to Amnesty International, the Suharto regime has murdered something like a million people. Quite a little Holocaust there! It probably wasn't done just out of bloodlust; the Suharto family has enriched itself to the tune of six billion dollars. By any reasonable form of reckoning, Roden Suharto is a war criminal. The Canadian government doesn't seem to care, and actually sells weapons to Indonesia. The Canadian government has invited Suharto to the APEC conference that will be held in Vancouver in November of this year, and will welcome him with open arms. Instead, we should take the initiative to arrest Suharto and demand that he be accountable for the blood on his hands. <br /> <br /> Most of what I know about NAFTA and APEC I have learned from other people, such as CCAFT and No! to APEC. But I have picked up a copy of the proposed text for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), so I need not rely on the analysis of others. I have found nothing that disagrees with their analysis, which can be found at the website of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA, http://www/policyalter- natives.ca). <br /> <br /> The MAI is a free trade agreement involving the 29 top industrial nations in the world, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Is Canada's economy large enough to survive the competition with economic giants such as the U.S. or Japan? I doubt it. <br /> <br /> The MAI puts NAFTA and APEC to shame. It may not be politically correct to say so, but this agreement is treason, pure and simple. The most damning clause is that you can't get out, at least not within the first five years. After that you can give six months' notice. However, the MAI shall still be in force for fifteen years after giving notice! As was mentioned earlier, fifteen years is a short enough period of time to completely exhaust us of certain natural resources or to cause irreparable damage to the environment. <br /> <br /> The MAI includes the usual free trade rules. All investors must be treated equally, regardless of whether they are foreign or local. Foreign investors cannot be required to use local employees. No investor can be required to buy or sell anything locally. Foreign investors must be allowed to freely transfer any capital or profits out of the country. The MAI applies to all existing and future investments. Countries can't make new laws that might conflict with the MAI, nor can you maintain existing ones. For those countries that would dare to break any rule, there is a section detailing how penalties are to be determined. <br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/97-2/issue12/corp.html">continued here</a>