February 2017 marked one year since Canada signed the TPP. On Jan 17, 2017, Trump withdrew US participation, making it unlikely for the deal to survive. Obama had promoted TPP with much hype, promising that it would give the US control over the economies of the Pacific and trump, if not sideline China, which was his aim. The US has long used trade as a tool in foreign policy and concluded agreements with small vulnerable strategically located countries (like Israel in 1985 and others like Morocco, Oman, Bahrain, Central and South America, all economies now hooked to the US like spokes to a hub. He claimed to be the first “Pacific President.”

At the SOTU address in 2016, he had urged Congress, “With TPP, China does not set the rules of the region; we do. You want to show our strength in the new century? Approve the agreement.” But TPP had a sinister side that would devastate small or poorer countries; its labour provisions would require partners to conform to ILO rates of pay and hours worked, which would increase their costs, and reduce their advantage over US workers. Similarly, the environmental rules would increase costs of mining and manufacturing and make them liable to complaints under the Dispute Resolution process, which fattens obscenely paid arbitrators, and can cripple the weak, as NAFTA cases have shown, mostly to US advantage.
Trump’s action might preserve nations’ sovereignty and right to manage their economies through market forces. The main loser is Japan and others who exploit developing countries; Japan as a major exporter had much to gain from TPP, which it has now ratified and has shifted from lobbying the US to persuading wavering Trudeau to ratify it, become the North American flag-bearer and watch good Canadian jobs disappear. Japan is lobbying all TPP countries, hoping to arm-twist them one by one to ratify TPP and thus pressure the US. Canadian International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne who is reported to believe that Canada could not go into TPP without the US. Already beleaguered by NAFTA and threatened with annihilation by its enthusiasm for CEPA, Canada stands to lose as European companies snap up its industries and cart them off to less costly East European countries where labour is still poorly organised. Canada will lose jobs in all sectors, as it has already lost control over agricultural products like canola, corn, grain, meat and others, to the large US-based chemical companies that seized agricultural industries and facilities, replaced farmers cooperatives with transnational off-farm conglomerates and fed us with processed instead of fresh food. The sheer weight and wealth allowed them to displace better alternatives, while benefitting from continued agricultural subsidies. So free trade might bring, as Chrystia Freeland, the negotiator blindly maintains, $20 billion a year to (a few) Canadians – chicken feed that will take away the hopes and jobs that young Canadians are training for. Meanwhile, Trudeau has generously held a hand out to refugees, but where will he find the jobs for those arriving without private assets or family support? His promised deficit is already huge. “Must the sins of the fathers be visited on the children?” Trudeau might well become the purveyor of these punishing visits!
“Canada and China agreed to start exploratory trade talks in the fall,” reports the National Post. Last year, China decided to impose a quality requirement re imported canola seed, which Freeland opposed, but China refused to discuss it during Trudeau’s visit. It was not an issue for the farmer so much as for Corporations.
I have commented on this several times; a repeat would not hurt: I cannot see any good in CEPA or any such trade deals except for the benefit of rich transnationals who can spread more easily among the partners, enlarge their market, hide profits in tax havens and become wealthier. That happens freely among signatories. But the process tends to destroy local enterprises, regardless of size, deplete jobs and generally impoverish manufacturing, commercial and agricultural enterprises. Who would have predicted the complete gutting of Hamilton industry, which included large companies like Stelco? I watched a bustling industrial sector become a large area of silence and deprivation, as industry after industry disappeared into the gloom, which Mulroney swore would not happen, as he sang Irish songs with Ronald Reagan. CEPA will nail Canada’s economic sovereignty shut.
“Transnational corporations are wreaking havoc on financial, economic, social and ecological systems in a creeping colonisation of public life where just 147 organisations now control 40 per cent of global trade.” Graham Vanbergen – The European Financial Review June/July 2016.

There was never a family altercation where my grandmother did not try to intervene to make peace. She was continuously on the lookout among us when we were children, listening for the smallest argument that could erupt into a conflagration of heated words, hot tears, and a stamping of feet.
So vigilant was she that we youngsters began finding alternative and innovative ways to settle disagreements. We fought in whispers, used sign language to indicate bodily harm with make-believe fisticuffs, and opened wide our eyelids and rolled our eyes to show as much impertinent white as possible.

We were constantly aware Ma could pounce out of nowhere at any time, landing before us with the accuracy of a mongoose, not even disturbing the dust under her feet, or make airborne the soft downy feathers of the chickens, which the slightest breath could take and bear aloft like the white silk from the towering silk cotton tree.
Ma would shake her forefinger and threaten to let us know, “What o’clock it was!” if we continued quarreling, lecturing us with the other hand on her hip, using that shrill voice to tell us, “Behave yourselves!” I never figured out what she meant by, “What o’clock it was”. For all I knew, it could have been a dire warning coming out of another place and time, and perhaps ending with an offender standing blindfold before a firing squad at 7:00 am the next day.
However, for her to say this meant it was similar to the seafaring days, when the saying went, “Red morning, sailors take warning”. Right away we knew we were sailing into stormy waters. It meant we had to stand down from the escalation of our childish vexation and bad behaviour, or face her stormy temper.
If it turned out we had entered tempestuous seas, such as one of us had poked another in the eye for not missing a turn at hopscotch, or refused to give up the coconut stem cricket bat after being legitimately run-out following the clatter of the tins that was the wicket, it mean Ma bustling off even faster than her normal hustle to the nearby black sage bush, there to break a “switch”.
Now she never learned, as we laughingly knew, that the branches of the black sage bush were quite elastic. That it was impossible to break off a branch with a quick snap, particularly to make a quick return and so to strike while the iron was hot, in a manner of speaking. Instead, it took focused industry to bend the branch in one direction, then the other, doing this numerous times, before it splintered and broke.
By the time Ma was done, any offender would have already made a dash for it, running at top speed into the sugarcanes, appearing for a moment under the tall mango tree at the top of the hill. There was even enough time as Ma struggled with the sage bush in the distance to check around the visible roots of the tree for freshly fallen and ripe mangoes, or to look up into the branches for more promising yellows.
However, it made no sense to run from the onslaught, since it meant having to return to the house, despite being filled with ripe mangoes, or guavas, or star apples, or whatever other happy fruit was in season, when evening spread its blanket of soot across the plain.
Now to get caught coming home at that time of evening, when it was daylight one minute, then “pitch-black” in an instant, meant the possibility of meeting an owl, also known as a “jumbie-bird”, on the way back, its mournful hooting bringing a death in the house by where it was crying. Or worse, perhaps meeting death itself in a “Jumbie” dragging a heavy iron chain bound to its festering legs, leaving a trail of squirming, one-eyed white maggots behind, the tortured spirit bemoaning its awful fate in the afterlife for political evils committed while inhabiting its human shape.
Obviously, this was a far more serious encounter with which to deal than Ma being out of breath and wielding with a tired arm the softest branch stripped off the top of the sage bush. For such a branch was nothing less than a feather when it hit a back, or a leg, or a palm dutifully held out. Such was her final choice for the “switch”, since it was the easiest to tear off, Ma having to give up two or three other attempts at breaking bigger and sturdier branches after using all of her heaving shoulder and the sole of a foot to hold it in place, her choice an impossibility due to the sage’s unyielding elasticity.
Perhaps it was not the “switch”, but Ma who straightened us out in the end. Maybe it was the effort she made, and then having us all lined up for punishment. It was not Ma hurting us, but how we hurt this kind, caring, and peace-loving lady when we fought among ourselves, which led to us becoming better-behaved adults.

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