Cultural Exemption Clause Remains Essential as Canada Continues to Pursue Bilateral Trade Pacts

With the Doha Round negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) continuing to be deadlocked, Canada was back on the bilateral track in 2008, signing four free trade agreements (FTAs) and announcing further negotiations for 2009.

In 2008, the country signed FTAs with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA, which includes Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) as well as with Peru, Colombia and Jordan.

In each of these agreements, Canada held fast to its position that cultural industries be kept off the negotiating table by seeing to it that a cultural exemption clause was included in the deals. Yet these clauses were not identical in all of the agreements. Though the same definition of cultural industries was used in the EFTA and Peru FTAs, in the agreement with Colombia its meaning was broadened to include the performing arts, visual arts and handicrafts. In the Canada-Peru FTA, while retaining Canada’s standard exemption, Peru also employed annexes to add provisions covering performing arts, visual arts and handicrafts.
As has been the case since the FTA with Costa Rica signed in 2001, Canada also included a reference to the importance of cultural policies and cultural diversity in the preambles to each of the FTAs. The UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions is not explicitly referenced, however.

The year 2009 also promises to be an interesting one as Canada will continue its negotiations with CARICOM, the C4 (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), Panama, South Korea and the Dominican Republic and launch new talks with the European Union and India.
Negotiations with the C4 countries and Panama are expected to conclude shortly. In recent articles published in Embassy Magazine, Peter Kent, Canada’s Minister of State of Foreign Affairs for the Americas, said at the time that the negotiations with C4 could be concluded as early as February, and Stockwell Day, Minister of International Trade, said he was hopeful that a conclusion will be reached in the negotiations with Panama by May, before the current Panamanian President’s term is up.

The upcoming negotiations with the European Union, for their part, are likely to be the most important undertaken by Canada since signing of the FTA with the United States more than 20 years ago. These negotiations are scheduled to get under way in May 2009 following the Canada-EU Summit in Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Canada and the EU are strong proponents of the Convention and have always advocated the exclusion of culture from trade negotiations. However, their cultural exemption clauses differ in scope, with the EU clause limited to audiovisual services and Canada’s extended to also include the publishing sector. The negotiations towards this Comprehensive Economic Agreement, envisaged as being significantly broader in scope than a basic FTA, will also be worth paying close attention to as they represent an opportunity for two champions of the Convention to give it greater currency by referencing it as rationale for excluding culture from the agreement.