EU/Canada Trade Deal Salvaged

An ambitious free-trade agreement between the EU and Canada has been salvaged at the last minute.  It appeared that the deal had collapsed after being rejected by the Parliament of the Belgian region of Wallonian (the French-speaking bit).  However, last minute-talks have allowed the Belgium national government to approve the deal.  But it came too late to prevent the cancellation of a visit to Brussels by the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, on the 27^th October to sign the deal. 

We wrote in July that it had been decided that the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) needed to be ratified by national Parliaments rather than just EU Member State governments and the EU Parliament.  Due to the arcane structure of Belgium’s political structures (with five regional assemblies), the region of Wallonia (with a population of 3.6m people) has an effective veto over a trade deal that affects the whole of the EU (population 508m).  The CETA deal has been seven years in negotiation.  It is, in the jargon, a ‘next generation’ deal – moving beyond the reduction of tariffs to deal with topics such as the harmonisation of standards and the settling of disputes between firms and governments.  This tends to make it more politically contentious as it can be viewed as diluting EU standards and giving too much power to multi-nationals.  Such arguments were behind the Wallonian vote. 

Readers may be wonderingwhat all this has to do with UK farming?  The key point is, as one politician involved in the process stated, ‘if the EU can’t do a trade deal with Canada, who can it do a deal with?’  CETA has been held up as a model of what a UK-EU arrangement after Brexit might look like.  The difficulties in approving the deal between Canada and Europe, where there is goodwill on both sides, does not bode well for the Brexit negotiations.