Drop corporate courts from the Canada trade deal

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Hi John,

The government is asking for input on its trade negotiations with Canada. Can you co-sign our submission telling them to drop corporate courts from the trade deal?

Co-sign the submission

The UK-Canada deal

We’ve been pushing the government for a few months now on the UK-Canada trade deal. At the moment they’ve ‘rolled over’ an earlier trade deal. It has the toxic corporate court system in it, but it is suspended and needs to be reviewed. The government wants to renegotiate the deal - and at present it still wants to keep corporate courts.

We called for them to hold a public consultation - and now they’re doing so, which is great! However the government is more focused on getting responses from big business. We need to make sure they hear from the public too - as many of us as possible need to speak up.

So we’ve written a submission to the consultation, and we want as many people as possible to co-sign it - if the submission has thousands of signatures, it might be heard, even among all of those from corporations.

Join us in telling the government to drop corporate courts in the UK-Canada deal!

Take action

The threat from corporate courts

Corporate courts (also known as ISDS) enable transnational corporations to sue countries outside of the national legal system over almost anything they don’t like - health, environmental regulations, workers rights - you name it. In recent years, we’ve seen a worrying trend of fossil fuel companies using corporate courts to undermine climate action.

Nearly three-quarters of mining companies globally are headquartered in Canada, and nearly half of all investment in mining goes through the Toronto Stock Exchange. Canadian mining and fossil fuel companies are active in corporate courts, and have sued many governments.

But we know the UK government can respond to public pressure on this. They want to slip corporate courts under the radar. When they tried to do that last month with the Australia trade deal, thousands of us spoke up and they backed down. Let’s see if we can do the same now.

Thank you for all that you do,

Jean Blaylock
Trade campaigner at Global Justice Now

PS. Co-signing our joint submission is an easy way to feed in to the consultation, but if you would like to do your own submission, the consultation is here. If there is interest, we could run a zoom call to support you - just reply to this message.

Behind closed doors...

The government is using trade rules to make life easier for big business, stripping away standards that protect us and our world.  

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