Weak environmental protections in NAFTA side deal not enforceable.
Windsor Star: March 8, 2008 and Straight Goods: March 10, 2008 (co-written with Randy Christensen)
Shades of deja vu! In the 1992 presidential election, critics of NAFTA raised concerns about environmental protection. When Mr Clinton became President he did actually put in place novel and promising environmental protections under NAFTA.
Today, those protections are being undermined by Canada, Mexico and the US. In other words, the blame doesn’t just lie with NAFTA, but with the NAFTA parties themselves.
The 1990s protections were put into a NAFTA side agreement to establish the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), an environmental watchdog. The CEC, based in Montreal, was founded on principles of public participation and transparency, and given a mandate that allows it to review virtually any environmental issue.
Perhaps the most attractive, and unique, aspect of the CEC was that citizens could call for investigations into allegations of a trade partner’s failure to enforce its own environmental laws, in hopes of potentially gaining a trade advantage. Mexico faced the greatest suspicion, given its low costs and apparent eagerness to suck business from the US.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have barely mentioned the CEC in their recent attacks on NAFTA, perhaps because the NAFTA parties have so constrained the CEC’s effectiveness. These constraints include preventing the CEC from moving forward with investigations or so limiting investigations that the findings are of little value.
When the CEC first opened its doors, US environmental groups were fairly quick to use the citizen complaint process to target American (mis)conduct in environmental law enforcement. Although these early efforts did not result in investigations, they did generate enough media coverage to encourage positive government behaviour.
US environmental groups were soon disillusioned, though, when the NAFTA governments effectively nixed an investigation into allegations of the widespread failure by the US to enforce migratory bird protection laws during logging operations.
The CEC’s expert body, the Secretariat, recommended a full investigation but the environment ministers of the NAFTA governments — which form the CEC ‘Council’ and retain a final say in approving investigations — ordered the Secretariat to limit its investigation to trivial and meaningless aspects of the allegation. This, despite the fact that the CEC’s only authority is moral suasion: investigators cannot make findings of guilt, and the CEC cannot impose sanctions.
The migratory bird case highlighted a rather obvious, but hardly insurmountable shortcoming of the CEC: politicians controlled the final decisions about whether an investigation would proceed — specifically the environment ministers of each country, including the minister of the country facing the allegation.
They are viagra pill highly efficacious in obesity induced loss of libido. Feeling Heaviness of body, swelling of eyelids (lower), belching which emit the smell of food consumed and water brash are few viagra generika symptoms which of indigestion caused by mandagni. Macula is the portion of the retina that helps you see fine detail and unica-web.com cheapest cialis is responsible for inhibiting the 5-alphareductase enzymes produced in the body during baldness. However, when you buy buy viagra online, you can only see the generic name instead of the brand name.
The accused country would thus be one of the judges, a problematic conflict of interest but only if the ministers refused to accept the recommendations of the Secretariat. Academics and citizen groups, along with the CEC’ s own advisory body, repeatedly urged the ministers to respect the independence of the Secretariat.
NAFTA’s environmental credibility rests on allowing the CEC independence, even though an investigation can cause embarrassment to the targeted NAFTA party.
Unfortunately, politicians with short-term vision seem to dominate among the environment ministers of the NAFTA parties. These ministers have often been unable to resist the temptation to stand in the way of investigations — of which only 23 have actually been recommended by the Secretariat since 1994 — that might prove embarrassing to one of them.
Currently, NAFTA ministers stand in the way of two recommended investigations, one targeting the US — and the alleged failure to enforce its own water protection laws against coal-fired power plants — and the other against Mexico. The first case has languished for over two years and the second for almost three years without a decision. In at least four other cases, the council took well over one year to act on recommendations.
Since the ministers make their decisions behind closed doors — in contrast to the Secretariat, which operates openly and transparently — their conduct has simply fomented skepticism and suspicion among groups using the process. Who is scratching whose back to keep investigations from proceeding? Only the ministers know.
Indeed, even where investigations have been completed, particularly in recent cases against Canada, the NAFTA parties have been keen to keep the results secret, at least until media scrutiny forced them to deliver the goods. And the process involves such long delays in both addressing the initial recommendation and releasing the final findings that by then, governments claim that the problem is old news.
Ultimately, therefore, if either Ms Clinton or Mr Obama, is serious about increasing NAFTA’s environmental protections, the first step is obvious: ensure that existing provisions are actually made to work. This will mean ensuring that investigations recommended by the CEC Secretariat are approved without delay. The parties can go further (without opening the side agreement to NAFTA) by adopting principles and procedures to secure the independence of the Secretariat.
Unless the NAFTA parties show a positive change in the approach to the CEC, we may find ourselves debating the issue of NAFTA’s environmental protections all over again in the next presidential election, without anyone being able to offer a defence.
