TPP not a good fit for Maine
Since 2014, I have been the House Co-Chair of the Citizen Trade Policy Commission (CTPC). The CTPC was created by the Legislature in 2003 to “assess and monitor the legal and economic impacts of trade agreements on state and local laws, working conditions and the business environment; to provide a mechanism for citizens and Legislators to voice their concerns and recommendations; and to make policy recommendations designed to protect Maine’s jobs, business environment and laws from any negative impact of trade agreements.”
To complete these responsibilities, the CTPC has studied at length the various free trade agreements (FTA) that have been proposed in recent years. In particular, the CTPC has extensively reviewed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which has been negotiated by the Obama administration and is likely to be voted on for approval purposes by Congress in the near future.
After careful consideration of all the pros and cons of the TPP, I have concluded that I am opposed to approval of the TPP and urge members of the Maine public and Maine’s Congressional delegation to adopt the same position. While I am in favor of “free trade”, very little of the TPP is actually concerned with free trade. Instead, the TPP and other recent FTAs largely focusses on the implementation of regulatory standards and dispute resolution mechanisms that tend to favor large international corporations and correspondingly do little to better the economic plight of the average Maine citizen.
In particular, the TPP includes many provisions which seek to implement a harmonization of regulatory standards that extend to many phases of our national and state economy such as agricultural and product safety, environmental protections and intellectual property. The primary problem with regulatory harmonization is the frequent adoption of the lowest common denominator approach which has the potential to impose regulatory levels which are not adequate towards protecting the public health and welfare.
Of equal concern, is the TPP’s inclusion of a dispute resolution mechanism called Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which allows investors to sue governments for laws and regulations which are judged to be in violation of a particular FTA. The ISDS process is significantly lacking in transparency and strikes me as fundamentally undemocratic.
The ISDS process makes use of three-person arbitration panels composed largely of corporate lawyers who have the authority to assess monetary damages against the federal government without the use of due process, past precedent or the right of appeal. The very real danger of the ISDS mechanism is its potential to supersede local, state and federal regulations and laws which have been established using our democratic process.
I also strongly object to the undemocratic manner in which the TPP was negotiated and the process by which it will be voted on by Congress. The TPP is negotiated in top secret and members of Congress did not have access to the negotiations as they were occurring. Instead, in negotiating the TPP and other recent FTAs, the United States Trade Representative makes use of some 700 advisors who have access to the text of trade negotiations and are largely composed of corporate and industry representatives with little or no legislative or public interest representation.
Upon completion of the final TPP agreement which will be submitted to Congress for final approval, an agreement which members of Congress had little or no input to, this undemocratic process also features a requirement for up or down vote with limited debate and no opportunity for amendments.
A recent study on the possible economic effects of the TPP was commissioned by the CTPC and was conducted by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. This paper entitled “The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Potential Impact on Maine’ can be viewed at its entirety at the CTPC website. This lengthy paper concludes that the TPP is likely to have a neutral or slightly positive effect on the Maine economy by 2032 but that significant losses in manufacturing jobs in the state will continue.
Given the state’s significant loss of manufacturing jobs since the implementation of NAFTA in the early 1990s, I’m not in favor of approving a largely undemocratic trade agreement that runs the risk of exacerbating the loss of manufacturing jobs in Maine. While the inexorable effects of economic globalism are difficult to separate from the particular effects of the TPP, I am firmly opposed to approval of this FTA by Congress.
Rep. Robert Saucier is in his second term in the Maine House and represents part of Presque Isle. He serves on the Legislature’s Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee and the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee. He is also House chair of the Maine Citizen Trade Policy Commission.
