HK e eM S ._ news@op.douglas.be.ca

Universities tag along for ‘Team Canada’ ride

Meg Murphy

 

TORONTO (CUP)— As a whirlwind
of networking and deal-making sweeps
through Latin America, eager representa-
tives of Canadian higher education are
doing their best to secure a piece of the
action,

Eighteen universities are participating
in the two-week trade mission to
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico
currently underway, which has been
dubbed “Team Canada’ by the Liberal
government.

They are acting a$ third-string players
beside Canadian business and the federal
and provincial governments in a fierce
competition to posit our innocuous
nation as a leader in the emerging global
economy.

The trade mission comes as a pre-
cursor to a free trade agreement with the
Americas (excluding Cuba), scheduled
to be signed in April.

According to a spokesperson from the
Association of Universities and Colleges
of Canada, the jaunt enables the sectors
to promote a common goal. All are
vying for prosperous trade relations with

Latin America, says Karen McBride.

“Canadian businesses have a real
interest in expanding into Latin
America,” she said. “And it is Canadian
universities’ mandate to prepare students
to operate in an environment which is
now global.”

This mission is the fourth annual
networking bonanza organized by the
federal government. In past years the
destination has always been somewhere
in Asia—first China, then South East
Asia, and most recently the Philippines,
Korea and Thailand.

McBride says post-secondary
participation in this mission will enable
Canada to throw a touch of warmth into
the climate of budding business liaisons,
making Canadian ties to Latin America
that much stronger.

“Tt is not just about economics, it is
about building bonds by understanding
each other's cultures,” she said, adding
collaborative projects and student
exchanges will accomplish this goal.

Building partnerships with educa-
tional institutions in the mission's four
pit stops is one main goal. It will both
help trade relations and promote

international diversity on Canadian
campuses, says McBride.

An aspect of these blossoming
relations will be student recruitment,
which is highly profitable for Canadian
universities since foreign students are
often charged three times what domestic
students pay.

Four Canadian Education Centres will be
opened for this purpose. They will be located
in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela.
Prior to this mission, the only Canadian
recruitment centre in Latin America was
located in Mexico.

The other primary incentive for the
education sector to participate in the
mission is the thrill of developing more
partnerships with Canadian businesses
in the process, she says.

But as higher-education officials are
swept into the free-trade frenzy, some
argue they are joining a business-heavy
team that has paid little heed to thé
societal threats of this game.

Ricardo Grinspun, director of the
Centre for Research on Latin American
and Caribbean Studies at York Univer-
sity, says serious oversights must be

addressed.

MAI report comes under fire

Jeremy Nelson

 

OTTAWA (CUP) — Critics of the
controversial global trade treaty
currently being negotiated by the federal
government say they are not impressed
with the work of a parliamentary
subcommittee that gave citizens their
only opportunity for direct input on the
matter.

The report authored by the parlia-
mentary subcommittee on foreign affairs
and international trade contains 17
recommendations detailing how the
Liberal government should proceed in
negotiating the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI).

Canada and 28 other industrialized
nations plan to sign the agreement this
May. .
Opponents of the MAI say it will do
tremendous damage to the Canadian
way of life by placing exorbitant powers
in the hands of private corporations
which could be exercised at the expense
of social, cultural and environmental
policy. The agreement, for example,
would give foreign-based corporations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the power to sue the federal government
if it passed a law or introduced a
regulation that they felt was harmful to
their business.

The report is the result of nine days of
hearings which took place in Ottawa last
November. These are the only public
hearings the federal government has held
on the agreement to date, though it has
been involved in secret MAI negotia-
tions for over two years.

Among other things, the report
recommends that the Liberal govern-
ment should broaden consultations on
the agreement and should consider
undertaking a full impact analysis
detailing the effects the MAI could have
on Canada’s environment, culture,
economy and society.

Some of the 144 presenters are
expressing disgust with the report and
with the hearings in general, alleging
that they were little more than a public-
relations scheme.

“It’s a sound idea to have hearings,
but the execution was a sham,” Carleton
University student Terry Cottam, a
founder of the national group MAI-Not,

 

 

 

 

en very “-conscientiou

said. “They didn’t publicize [the
hearings], they announced them at the
last minute, they kept changing the
times for presentations and they held
them only in Ottawa.”

Also critical of the hearings and the
report is Bill Blaikie, international trade
critic for the New Democratic Party and
a member of the subcommittee. He
agrees that the hearings were poorly
executed and says the final report was
largely toothless and predictable.

“None of the recommendations have
anything to do with putting enforceable
rules in the MAI itself,” Blaikie said.

“Why does the government feel so
confident about pursuing an agreement
that is so lopsided in favour of investors?
They never really answered that
question.”

As drafted, the MAI would prevent
the government from creating any new
labour, environmental and cultural
regulations for the next 20 years, if those
laws were deemed to be harmful to the
business of a domestic or foreign
investor.

The subcommittee recommended that

fidential files,” says

 

He says universities should look at the
types of collaborations they are carving,
as well as the ethics of those around
them.

“One thing is very worrisome. A lot
of these contacts are being started
around business-university linkages. To
what extent are these university links
established around a business agenda
and to what extent are they established
around academic priorities?” he
questioned.

On Jan. 13 in Mexico City, Canadian
businesses and educational institutions
signed 91 new business deals worth
$229.9-million. This marked the largest
number of deals signed at one time on a
team mission.

“There is a clear trade-business agenda
here. Unfortunately, this arrangement
has not been shaped up taking into
account the societal implications of these
connections in terms of how they will
impact Canada and Latin America,”
Grinspun said.

But McBride says universities, for
their part, will encourage Latin Ameri-
can countries to address some of these
social issues through collaborative

the Canadian negotiating team push for
the introduction of labour, environmen-
tal and cultural protections into the -

agreement itself, but didn’t outline what
Canada should do if these were rejected.

Blaikie says he finds this unacceptable.
“[With the MAI] we would have a
perverse moral hierarchy where investors
get to have their rights enshrined,
protected and enforced, and the rest of
us just get strong language,” he said.

Bob Speller, chair of the subcommit-
tee, says the report is a fair representa-
tion of the views of the subcommittee,
which consisted of five Liberal MPs and
one MP from each of the officially
recognized parties.

“The hearings sent a message to the
government that all the parties were
concerned about the negotiations,”
Speller, a Liberal MP, said. “Overall, our
report reflected what the majority of
people were saying.”

But Blaikie issued his own dissenting
report on the hearings, as did the
subcommittee’s Reform member.

Speller says, however, that these
reports are unrepresentative of the

courses.

“From the universities’ perspective,
academic cooperation allows you to
work with these countries around areas
of concern, like environmental and
human rights issues,” she said. “It is
through sharing expertise that we can
make improvements.”

Several key universities decided not to
take part in the Team Canada trade
mission this year. These include York
University, University of Victoria,
Concordia University, Dalhousie
University, University of British
Columbia and the University of New
Brunswick.

Of those contacted, several suggested
that scheduling problems prevented
them from attending, particularly
because the government did not provide
adequate notice of the trip's timing.

A few also candidly admitted their
interests in foreign student recruitment
is centred in Asia, while others delivered
a rather interesting version of the two.

“Tt was just a matter of timing,” a
public relations officer at UBC, said.
“We have participated in past Team Asia,
I mean Team Canada trips before.”

committee's work.

“They were two extreme, opposing
views, and the majority of the people on
the committee, and probably the
majority of people who presented, were
somewhere in the middle,” he said.

Blaikie says he disagrees with this
characterization.

“Who are the extremists here? To me,
the extremists are the people who think
that everything should be left to the
whims of the marketplace.” Both
Cottam and Blaikie say the reports
calling for broader consultations on the
agreement are pointless unless the
federal government becomes more -
accountable to the public.

“What needs to happen is the
government hears our questions and
answers us, and not the other way
around,” Cottam said. “What happened
at these hearings was that the public
answered to the government. The
hearings went back to front, and that’s
not democracy.”

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The Other Press January 211997 3