The trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and Canada was rejected on Thursday March 21 in the Senate, thanks to a convenient left-right alliance. If this election deals a serious blow to this controversial free trade agreement, its fate is still far from being sealed.
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), better known by its English acronym CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), was concluded by negotiators from the Canadian government and the European Commission in 2014.
For three years, it suffered strong challenges from civil society and left-wing parties on the European side, before finally receiving the green light from heads of state and MEPs in 2017. Since that date, the agreement has been signed and most of its measures have entered into force.
However, the application of CETA is only provisional and piecemeal. As part of its clauses encroach on the competences of EU member states, all national parliaments must be consulted before its final and complete entry into force. To date, only seventeen Parliaments out of twenty-seven have given their agreement. For the other ten, the governments dragged out the process, probably for fear of being refused by their parliamentarians.
This was the case for France. After having CETA narrowly ratified by the National Assembly in the summer of 2019 – opening an unprecedented divide in the Macronist majority – the government was reluctant to register the text in the Senate to finalize the accelerated parliamentary procedure, for fear of a failure.
This meant counting without the communist senators, who took advantage of their right of initiative to impose the examination of this question on March 21, during their parliamentary niche. At the end of the vote, the Senate rejected the ratification project by a large majority.
Return to the Assembly
The parliamentary shuttle now provides for the text to return to the National Assembly, which will have the last word. It remains to be seen when this new vote will take place: the government is reluctant to include it on the parliamentary agenda but the communist deputies have announced that they will, like their colleagues in the Senate, include this text in their reserved parliamentary time – their “niche » – scheduled for May 30.
If, during this election, a majority of deputies reject CETA – which is possible given the current balance at the Palais-Bourbon – the government would probably be forced to acknowledge the failure of ratification. Unless he tries to bypass Parliament by organizing a new vote, he should logically notify the European institutions of this failure.
European heads of state would then in principle be required to put an end to the provisional application of CETA, and to definitively bury the agreement – ??even if doubts remain about the automaticity of such a scenario, until now unpublished.
Conversely, if a majority of deputies approve CETA in the National Assembly, it will be officially ratified by France. All eyes would then turn to the last nine European states not to have received the green light from their Parliament. Among them, we find Italy, whose far-right government clearly opposes the treaty, and Cyprus, whose deputies already rejected the agreement in a first vote in 2020.
If the EU-Canada agreement successfully passes this parliamentary obstacle course, it would then enter fully and definitively into force. This would allow the activation of the last unapplied chapters of CETA, in particular the much criticized company-State arbitration mechanism.
