This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Ontario was putting real policies in place to honor that commitment (unlike the Canadian government as a whole, which has allowed emissions to balloon, leading it to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than face international censure). Most importantly, the program was working. How absurd, then, for the WTO to interfere with that success—to let trade trump the planet itself. And yet from a strictly legal standpoint, Japan and the EU were perfectly correct. One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something called “national treatment,” which requires governments to make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms outside their borders. Indeed, favoring local industry constitutes illegal “discrimination.” This was a flashpoint in the free trade wars back in the 1990s, precisely because these restrictions effectively prevent governments from doing what Ontario was trying to do: create jobs by requiring the sourcing of local goods as a condition of government support. This was just one of the many fateful battles that progressives lost in those years.