Comment 83109

By Tungsten (anonymous) | Posted November 22, 2012 at 08:54:35

Say goodbye to Dalton McGuinty’s green industry strategy for jobs and manufacturing. The World Trade Organization may have put the boots to it. But the Ontario premier and his government were unwitting accomplices....

Under the WTO pact, Canadian provinces have wide leeway to demand local content in government procurement contracts. Ontario, for instance, requires that 25 per cent of public transit vehicles purchased by municipalities be manufactured in Canada.

But the key here is that a public body does the purchasing. In the green energy case, according to the newsletter Bloomberg WTO Reporter, Japan and the European Union successfully argued that the purchasers to whom Buy Ontario rules apply (the private generators) are not public bodies.

“It seems they (the government) left themselves open to a challenge,” Scott Sinclair, a trade researcher for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said Wednesday.

Sinclair points out that Quebec has demanded local content rules for green energy projects since 2004, without facing any trade challenges.

But in that province, such projects — even if privately financed — come under the umbrella of crown corporation Hydro Quebec, a public body with an effective monopoly on power generation.


http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1291187--walkom-dalton-mcguinty-scores-an-assist-as-wto-torpedoes-ontario-green-strategy

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