[DrCaleb]

Thanos Thanos:

$1:

And some in Canada would do that even if we had the US over a barrel, as long as they made a good cut out of it.

One of the many negative side effects of having a country where everyone talks a good game about unity but in reality are more than willing to fuck each other over. Not just for gain either but just for the weird region vs. region/province vs. province spite that animates too much of the Canadian character. Even the Americans, no matter how much they genuinely detest each other over politics/religion/race, don't merrily screw each other over on some petty regional basis just for the fun of it.

It's not Canadians screwing over Canadians. Most of the lumber companies (that got the tariffs refunded) are US owned. Many saw mills are Canadian owned. It's the saw mills that take it in the poop chute.

Canadians own our forests, and as another article I published points out:

$1:

In the early days of the softwood wars, the difference between stumpage in Canada and the U.S. was dramatic, but for a good reason.

No one wanted to go to places in northern Canada to chop down skinny trees. The companies had to build roads and new lumber mills and ship their product many kilometres to markets.

So to attract the economic activity and jobs created by the lumber companies willing to do that work, the governments that owned the forests offered cheap deals on stumpage. That, too, is the market at work.

In the U.S., where they used up what they had believed to be their endless wild forests, there were no northern resources to milk for jobs. There, much of the land is privately owned and highly productive. As in Europe, forests there have been repeatedly grown and cropped, and lumber producers bid against each other for the mature trees.

Stumpage was therefore higher in the U.S. — but labour, transportation and many other costs were lower.

http://www.canadaka.net/link.php?id=98729

It's the US companies that want to own the forests and avoid the stumpage fees, or sell rights to them. Those fees go into General Revenue, so we'd lose yet another source of government revenue.

[JaredMilne]

Lemmy Lemmy:

During the NAFTA negotiations, the hill we chose to die on was the Bilateral Disputes panel. We gave up a dozen things to make sure we had an equally represented disputes mechanism. How shortsighted that was. We should have known from Day 1 that the USA would never abide by any disputes mechanism that ruled in Canada's favour. It was folly for us to have expected the USA to play by the rules.

What I find so baffling is the Canadian negotiators for trade deals like CETA being so adamant about an ISDS panel being part of the deal, despite the fact that Australia won't have anything to do with the panels anymore, and they're one of the main reasons that there are so many protests against CETA and so much doubt about governments approving the deal.

Like I've said before, it's like the "Court Party" conservatives in Canada have complained about-progressives using the courts to make the social changes and get the rulings they want when they can't convince legislators to do it. They say the court is usurping the rightful role of the legislature...but at least the courts have a Constitutional mandate to do these things, not to mention checks on their power like the notwithstanding clause.

Meanwhile, the ISDS panels have no Constitutional mandate, few if any real checks on their authority...and nary a peep from that I've seen from the conservative intelligentsia.

[Lemmy]

Well a lot has changed since the original Can-US FTA negotiations way back in the late '80s. That was the days of GATT, before the formation of the World Trade Organization. When the WTO replaced GATT, a standing international disputes resolution body came into force. Prior to that, disputes panels were in place in all trade deals, but they've become unnecessary now because the WTO handles all that.

Problem is, the USA doesn't abide by WTO rulings any more than it used to abide by FTA/NAFTA disputes panel rulings. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.