Well, it’s not that new anymore, but lot of people have been blogging about the letter that Maine Governor Baldacci wrote to the US Trade Representative (USTR) calling for Maine to be removed from key parts of the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) Agreement. The letter even made it into Library Journal. What is new is that I just found that the Florida Fair Trade Campaign has posted the Maine story to its site and I wonder if other states are doing the same… But here I have to admit that I don’t know much about how the Fair Trade groups work - and I’ve never come across anything like them in Canada (someone correct me if I’m wrong).
That Maine wants to pull itself out of the WTO could set a great precedent for folks in other states who think the trade agreements might be a bad idea. I wonder if this will help reignite the anti-GATS work in Canada, too - it’s such important work that’s just so hard to get around to doing. Anyone looking for a quick anti-GATS maneuver can send a copy of the letter that the Librarians Against the WTO put up on their site to the Minister of International Trade, David Emerson.
Here is one of my favourite anti-GATS sites. Maybe we should mass-produce “Make libraries a GATS-free zone” buttons for the upcoming Canadian Library Association conference in Ottawa (note: there will be one session at the conference on trade agreements - I’m pretty sure it’s running on Thursday from 2:45 to 4:15 and I invite curious folks to come; the presenters, Sam Trosow and Kirsti Nilsen, know their stuff well).
S.