Thank you.
The New Brunswick union, headquartered in Fredericton, has about 8,500 members, about 7,000 of whom work in the public sector here in New Brunswick. We are the New Brunswick component of the National Union of Public and General Employees, the 360,000 member NUPGE. We have concerns about the effects of TPP on public services, both as users of the public services and as employees working to provide them.
First, it's that the agreement adopts a negative list approach, meaning that all services and investments are subject to the TPP's provisions unless specific reservations or exclusions are negotiated and identified in the country's specific sections.
Canada has negotiated a reservation in the area of social services, as well as aboriginal treaty rights and cultural industries, and in doing so, and I'm quoting from the text:
Canada retains the right to adopt or maintain a measure for supplying public law enforcement and correctional services as well as the following services to the extent that there are social services established or maintained for a public purpose—income security or insurance, social welfare, public education, public training, health, and child care.
While this appears to be a positive step, our issue is that the phrase “public purpose” is not defined within the text of the TPP. This is problematic, as all governments do not share interpretations of what constitutes a public service. Ultimately, it would be up to the arbitration program, with the dispute settlement, to build up a jurisprudence around what it is that public purpose means. We could come to a time where we find the Canadian government and provincial governments constrained as to what they are permitted to do.
The annex also doesn't include various ancillary services that ensure the ongoing functioning of the social services that I mentioned. For example, in the area of health, it does not identify ancillary health services, such as cleaning services, maintenance and administration, as social services. Therefore, anything in that area would be subject to the TPP.
The negative list also means any unanticipated services that are deemed to serve a public purpose in the future will not be protected by the reservation, and will thus be subject to the provisions of the TPP, because they haven't been identified in the current text. Things that governments in Canada might want to provide as a public service in the future, that are unanticipated as of now because they don't exist yet, governments would be constrained in their ability to provide those services.
An additional concern linked to this is based on the standstill and the ratchet provisions of the TPP. The standstill provision is intended to create an irreversible minimum standard for liberalization through the exclusion of new or additional restrictions. According to this provision, governments are not allowed to implement new regulations or restrictions on trade and investment. Quite the opposite, governments are required to only move toward greater conformity with the provisions of the agreement. As an extension to this, the ratchet provisions prohibit governments from reversing any voluntary privatization efforts.
Not only does the standstill provision create a new standard of liberalization of trade and investment in services, but the ratchet provision prevents government from reducing privatization in the future. Perhaps even more troubling than the potential trend toward privatization is the fact that it will be irreversible. As a trade union, particularly one that has members working in the public service, it's natural that we would be opposed to privatization as a concept, but I think regardless of one's view of whether or not services are best delivered by the public sector or private sector, the irreversible nature of some of the rules here in the TPP around that should be bothersome to all of us, because it potentially constrains governments in the future.