It would be intersting to know why. Is it becaseu there is some local industry that will be overwhelmed by imports from Canada? Or, is the region just trying to get recognised?
Note that once again EU free trade actually means EU protection for EU businesses.
I think at the end of the day people are realising that the EU is neither loose enough to allow individual nations to do their own thing, nor tight enough to have eliminated nationalism or the need for national legislatures and executives.
In short it's a tussle between localism and centralism.
With britain having delivered a massive blow for localism.
The MEPs have no say in this current matter. This is a district issue.
I honestly thought Belgium was a sovereign country when it came to the EU and didn't realise that one small area of Belgium could effectively veto the whole of the EU. It makes a nonsense of the whole process.
It is a peculiarity of the Belgian constitution. The treaty has to be ratified by all member states and the constitution requires that each regional government must back a deal before the federal government can sign it. It has nothing to do with MEPs.
Point of fact 1: as already stated, it is not MEPs blocking it, it is the regional legislature. The Parliament has already indicated consent.
Point of fact 2: it only requires ratification by every legislature because the Commission sought to avoid delay by taking it forward as a "mixed agreement" for political reasons. The Commission made this clear in July:
"From a strict legal standpoint, the Commission considers this agreement to fall under exclusive EU competence. However, the political situation in the Council is clear, and we understand the need for proposing it as a 'mixed' agreement, in order to allow for a speedy signature."
So arguably it demonstrates both (a) the difficulty in getting agreement with the EU and (b) the way Brussels operates by deals done behind the scenes.
Everyone knows that trade deals in the EU are negotiated by the commission and then have to be approved by all 28 member states. Similarly with Brexit. There has been an internal battle between the Commission and the Council as to who will control the negotiations and it seems the Commission has won.
The MEPs in question are using this as a weapon to gain concessions. If they all did this then there would never be a single EU trade deal That is why EU trade deals take years and years to negotiate. On the other hand once we leave the EU we can negotiate our own deals much more quickly. This is something you should celebrate rather than sit there hoping something goes wrong just so you can say "Told you so".
That was half of it. The government also have (very rightly in my mind) concerns about the commercial courts which are established by the treaty, which gives large nulti-national companies the right to sue a foreign government for interference in their commercial interests (e.g. loss of profits due to plain packaging cigarettes), which is something that not even national (i.e. the local) companies can or will be able to do. Elevating North American companies to have more power over your government than local companies have is just plain wrong.
I rather suspect the Belgium goverernment is the only EU government which actually read and understood the treaty.
More of your bare faced lies. They actually said that with plenty of stuff like with treatys and which countrys could join the EU, each country already in the EU has a veto.
Only terminal fuckwits like you are so pig ignorant that they don?t realise that that has always been the case.
Well, he's not wrong about the UKIP MEPs and this does show that making a trade deal with the EU is not as straightforward as the Brexiteers would like to believe. Canada has been working on this deal for seven years.
Making a trade deal with Canada would take about ten minutes if there was nothing to argue about.
The chance of there being something to argue about increases exponentially with the number of people who can refuse to sign.
And that is the problem with the EU. It isn't a Union. IT's not even enough of a soviet style republic for the central bureaucracy to enforce its will on the nations.
And that fact arises because the EU has bribed the politicians of its comprising nation states to sell the idea to their electorates. It has never actually done the hard work of creating a bureaucracy that works . So it is just one massive elite carving up tax euros and distributing it to each other. Just as the CP in the Soviet Union did, except they were smart enough to spend some of their money on tanks, so when Hungary tries a Sovexit, they stuck Russian tanks into Budapest to make the point, that no one leaves the Soviet Union.
And that may be teh fatal; flaw of trying to create a soviet style command economy by stealth. Even the mass migration hasn't yet become enough of a problem to justify a Euroforce of armed military and so on to enforce martial laws on the continent.
So what we have is an executive that has failed to buy enough people to get to do as it likes.
And hasn't the guts to do more than murder the odd objector, and is thoroughly unpopular with the European citizen, pretending that such a political entity as 'Europe' actually exists, and they actually represent it, when the third largest at least member has said 'The Euremperor has no clothes'
And the canadian deal is just yet another reasons why it appears to have been caught with its trousers down. It isn't wearing any. Not even Merkel.
It's the staggering naivete of remoaners that I find worrying.
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