USW – Stop the TPP: Canadians Deserve a Better Deal

The United Steelworkers is not anti-trade, but our union is opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The USW made a submission to government proceedings reviewing the TPP in May, 2016.

The United Steelworkers believes the Trans-Pacific Partnership will not resolve the most important challenges that have decimated our manufacturing base in recent years.

The USW submission outlines our reasons for opposing the TPP:

• The TPP will further erode Canada’s manufacturing and industrial base and eliminate Canadian jobs
• Enhanced Investor-State Dispute Settlement under the TPP further undermines the public interest
• TPP investor protections will increase drug costs and threaten public healthcare programs
• The TPP will hinder Canada’s ability to address climate change
• The TPP’s labour mobility provisions exacerbate existing problems with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program
• The TPP has only weak enforcement of labour rights
• Canadians deserve a better deal

“Our union is not anti-trade. However, we believe that trade as an instrument of economic policy can forge a new approach; one that would lift wages up rather than push them down, one that would reduce our growing trade deficit, one that would promote domestic manufacturing and employment rather than more outsourcing and offshoring, one that would begin to reverse the widening gap of income inequality.”