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No. NAFTA Tribunal do not cover the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods

Full disclose: Not being a lawyer, The following is just a lay person's bullshit.

As stated in the article, this was a

intellectual property case over whether judges can apply their own country's laws to all of the internet.

As the 7-2 ruling suggests, the decision is debatable. This is something NAFTA was made for. One of NAFTA's roles is to facilitate trade between favored nations and to protect business from unfair practices. In this case, chapter 11, NAFTA's investor-state dispute mechanism, allows Google to sue Canada in a secret tribunal. That Canada is the most successfully sued country under NAFTA could be one small point in Google's favor. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/nafta-chapter-11-investor-state-disputes-january-1-2015

A larger point is that the judges are applying Canadian law on the rest of the globe, something far beyond a mere local intellectual property dispute. The NAFTA Secretariat and the aforementioned tribunal could easily rule this extension of Canadian law an unfair practice. And in so doing, would negate the entire ruling.

According to this the US lost 30% of its capacity to create good jobs over the last 30 years when you take all types of compensation into account.

Globalization is neither good nor bad, but CETA is a bad deal. Especially when we want to battle resource limitations and climate change. A key problem with CETA is the so called protection for investors, which sounds like we do not have a proper legal system in Canada and the EU.

Investor protection isn't a bad thing to have in a trade deal per se. The main idea is supposed to be to prevent things like nationalization of an industry after a trading partner country's company(s) setup shop, or to pass laws that effectively bypass the agreement altogether by passing laws which directly disadvantages the trade partners industries, while favouring the local industries (i.e.: make widgets sold by the trading partner illegal, but permit locally made widgets). I would think that if you owned a Canadian company and decided to spend a ton of money to setup a factory in Belgium, only for a local government to expropriate your factory without permission or compensation (like Cuba did to various US companies in 1960), you would be pretty pissed off. Likewise (and probably more likely), you'd also be pretty cheesed if you spent a bunch of money and effort to import your widgets to (say) France, only for the French government to turn around and find some bullshit reason to make import and sell your product effectively impossible (i.e.: perhaps they decide suddenly post-agreement that all widgets must contain 100% raw goods refined in France, or that all workers building widgets must be fed a steady diet of baguettes made in Paris), you'd likewise be pretty pissed that the goalpost was moved in order to disadvantage you, while giving your competition within a trade partner nation an unfair advantage.

Ideally under such protections, changes to environmental and product safety laws shouldn't be a problem so long as they apply to everyone equally. That's the goal at least -- not having read CETA myself, I can't say how close it comes to the ideal. However, as a comparison here is a list of all current NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Disputes, which makes for an interesting read on the types of disagreements the NAFTA ISDS-equivalent has dealt with.

Ultimately, I don't think that a clause in a free trade agreement that says "you'll treat our companies and goods as you do your own companies and goods" is a bad thing, and anyone who is automatically against the concept of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement system is wrong (there really isn't a point to a free trade system without one). I think that criticism of the implementation of an ISDS system is fair game (so long as the goal is to make the system fair and reasonable) -- but as there are a lot of ways legislation can be drafted to disadvantage foreign goods without tariffs, a free trade agreement without such a system in place is meaningless.

(And if you really can't stand having your local industries on a level footing with a foreign trading partner (and vice-versa), then you need to either negotiate an exemption for those industries when you (re)negotiate the agreement in the first place, or have the decency to back out of the agreement entirely. Disadvantaging your trading partners trade while expecting them to uphold their end of the agreement is a completely dick move that makes a mockery of trade agreements).

Yaz

Please check this out: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/canadas-quiet-bargain

More info can be found here: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/canadas-quiet-bargain Tax cuts mean services cuts, and most people would be better off pooling resources for services rather than paying for everything themselves.

George Bush is making all of us less secure. And we have to trust him to protect our privacy? Not. Try this: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/200 5/12/MonitorIssue1275/index.cfm?pa=DDC3F905 Richard

Are you too young to remember Pierre Trudeau using the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties when Quebec terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat? Canada fought its own nasty little war with Quebec separatists in the 1960s and 70s and used many of the same tactics that we are currently using in the States. I remember an uncle of mine from New Brunswick lamenting the fact that the RCMP did not have the same kinds of files and data on Quebec radicals that the FBI had on US anti-war radicals.

Go look up the Act to Combat Terrorism (Bill C-36) and its companions.

Is High Times and other pro-marijuana literature still banned in Canada? Or has that sort of anti-free speech law that Canada used to be infamous for finally died out? Its been a while since I've been North to visit the relatives.

Sorry, I know that both Canada and the world have romantic notions about what an ideal place Canada is (kinda like Norway) and I don't really mean to piss in your Wheaties, but you need to read your own history. Canada has had many of the same fights over civil liberties vs security that the US has had. And civil liberties have lost many rounds in Canada.