Trade agenda propels privatization

 Shifting ground: Canada’s position

 GATS provisions dangerous propositions

 Clear threat, clear response

 Frozen out: Young people and the public sector...

What’s a service?

According to the WTO, there are more than 160 sub-sectors and activities that can be classed as services and therefore opened up to private delivery and foreign competition. Their wish list for privatization includes:

• Human and animal health
• Education at all levels
• Recreational, cultural and sports services, including entertainment, libraries, archives and museums
• Environmental services including road construction and maintenance, garbage collection, sewage disposal, water delivery, protection of the landscape and urban planning
• Medical and dental services
• Services provided by midwives, nurses, physiotherapists and paramedical personnel
• Postal services
• Transportation
• Financial services, banking and insurance
• Research and development
• Publishing, printing, advertising

GATS provisions dangerous propositions

If the GATS is extended to all services, the profit motive will determine how those services will be delivered. Corporations would be free to set up operations in any WTO country. As a result, private, for-profit hospitals and universities would have a guaranteed right to operate in Canada, forcing public institutions to compete with them for public funding. Services could be provided cross-border, including tele-medicine or internet-based university programs which have no Canadian content. Services could also be provided abroad. For example, patients could be sent abroad to get medical care or patient records could be handled by staff overseas.

Corporations would also gain the right to recruit service workers from abroad. By staffing Canadian services with workers from other countries, the WTO argues that business could benefit from "more skilled, more efficient and/or less costly personnel than might be available on the domestic labour market."

If the GATS is extended to cover services such as health care, private insurance companies will place further stress on public health care. Private health care companies make a profit by poaching the lowest-risk patients — young and healthy — for themselves, leaving the public system to deal with those who cannot afford private care — the poor, the elderly, women, single parents and people with disabilities. As the public system becomes further overburdened, the pressure will mount on middle class people to abandon public care for a private system.

The GATS offers an exemption for "services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority." But to qualify, a public service must be the sole supplier of the service and not operate on a commercial basis. Once there is a private competitor — and the GATS guarantees the right of private suppliers to set one up — public providers may lose the protection of this exemption. As well, there is no definition of "commercial basis," so charging user fees such as tuition may qualify a service as "commercial."

The GATS restricts the power of all governments. The decisions of every province and municipality will be subject to WTO rules. Coupled with a proposed WTO code on government procurement, local and provincial governments would be stripped of the power to use their spending to support community economic development.

Deregulation is another dangerous aspect mandated by the GATS. Treaty provisions require governments to ensure that their licensing requirements both for facilities and for service workers are kept to a minimum. Credentials seen as above the bare minimum will be deemed a "barrier to trade." The WTO would have the right to question employment qualifications, environmental standards and many other areas of public policy. For example, it has been argued that "excessive privacy and confidentiality requirements" represent an unfair barrier to offshore management of patient records.

National treatment provisions of the GATS mean governments cannot "discriminate" between foreign and domestic suppliers of services, guaranteeing foreign suppliers the same treatment as local suppliers, including community-based not-for-profit organizations.

For example, governments cannot "discriminate" by requiring foreign suppliers to hire locally or establish a local presence or do anything else that "modifies the conditions of competition." Nor could they insist on Canadian representation on the boards of private hospitals or universities.