European Commission Trade Sustainability Impact Assessments (hereafter also referred to interchangeably as “Trade SIAs,” “TSIAs,” or simply “SIAs”) assess the potential impacts of proposed trade liberalisation agreements on all pillars of sustainable development in order to optimise policy decision-making/trade negotiations. The EU-Canada SIA is conducted by DEVELOPMENT Solutions Europe Ltd. (DS) in cooperation with key external experts.
The SIA is divided into 3 phases:
Phase 1 (end of July – beginning of September 2010)
Phase 1 was designed to ensure the review of relevant information sources, flagging of sustainability issues, first stages of data preparation, preparation of analytical tools and to present how the work for the EU-Canada SIA will be carried out. The phase culminated with the Final Inception Report.
Inception Report: following submission of the draft Inception Report at the end of August 2010, the first Steering Committee Meeting and Civil Society Meeting was held in Brussels on 7 September 2010 to formally discuss the contents of the report and provide any necessary feedback for revisions. The minutes of this Civil Society meeting can be found on the SIA website at http://www.eucanada-sia.org/.
Feedback from the steering committee meeting and civil society meeting were directly incorporated into the Inception Report in order to create the Final Inception Report. The report was made public on the SIA website after approval in August 2010.
Phase 2 (September 2010 – December 2010/January 2011)
Phase 2 was designed to incorporate developments from Phase 1 and deliver the Trade SIA’s interim quantitative and qualitative impact assessment, which was presented in the Interim Report. The Interim Report only includes preliminary considerations from the economic modelling, and not the full results of these models.
Consultation with civil society was an important tool for development of the impact assessment in this report. During this phase the team prepared for and delivered the Local Workshop in Ottawa on 26 November 2010. A Preliminary Findings document, a summary of the results from the draft Interim Report, was provided to stakeholders registered to attend that meeting. The minutes of the Local Workshop can be found on the SIA website.
Interim Technical Report:
The draft Interim Technical Report was submitted to the Steering Committee in late October 2010 and its contents were initially discussed at the second Steering Committee meeting on 10 November 2010. A revised version of the report was submitted to the Contracting Authority in mid December 2010. The report was made public on the SIA website after approval in January 2011.
25 Phase 3 (January – April 2011)
Phase 3 builds on the Interim Technical Report and ultimately culminates in the Final Report. This phase involves further incorporation of stakeholder feedback into the impact analysis, revised economic modelling, revised impact assessment, and policy recommendations.
The draft Final Report was submitted to the Contracting Authority in early March 2011 and made public on the SIA website in late March 2011. A second Civil Society Meeting and the third and final steering committee meeting were held in Brussels on 30 2011 March to review and provide feedback on the draft Final Report. The minutes of this meeting are available in the annex of this report.
Final Report:
Contents: This Final Report includes all findings from the study. The report includes the following elements:
Executive Summary
Introduction and progress of the SIA’s implementation
Summary of methodology
Baseline conditions overview (trade and economic, social and environmental spheres)
Final sustainability impact assessment (including modelling results and expert analysis) o Macro level (trade and economic, social and environmental spheres)
o Sectoral level (trade and economic, social and environmental spheres) o Cross cutting level (trade and economic, social and environmental spheres)
Proposals for flanking measures/policy recommendations
Conclusions
Information on consultation activities undertaken
References
Annexes (modelling tables; minutes of local workshop, workshop program and list of participants
Additionally, the Final Report is accompanied by a Briefing Document for the Contracting Authority.
State of play
The EU-Canada SIA Final Report provides a comprehensive sustainability assessment on potential impacts of trade liberalisation under CETA. The assessment is undertaken at three levels:
Macro-economic assessment
Sectoral assessment
Cross-cutting issues assessment
The macro-economic section discusses macro-economic effects forecasted for Canada and the EU as a whole, and includes a brief discussion of the macro-economic effects on certain third countries.
The sectoral assessment looks in detail at the social, economic and environmental impacts in 3 sectors and 16 sub-sectors. The sectors and sub-sectors selected for analysis in this report are those that contain the highest frequency and magnitude of potential impacts and sensitivities as identified in the Inception Report and as confirmed and/or added by additional research (including consultations) for the Interim Report. The 3 sectors and 16 sub-sectors: are the agriculture, processed agricultural products (PAPs), and fisheries sector, and the sub-sectors of grains and oilseeds, beef and pork, dairy, other PAPS,
26 beverages, and fisheries; the industrial products sector, and the sub-sectors of mining and manufactured metal products (ferrous, nonferrous and fabricated metals), oil and petroleum products, coal, forest-based industries (wood, paper and forestry), automotive and transport equipment, textiles (textiles clothing, leather and footwear); and the services sector, and the sub-sectors of transportation, telecommunications, financial, and other business services.
The cross-cutting assessment analyses 7 key issues. These ‘cross-cutting’ issues are defined in part by the study’s Terms of Reference. The cross-cutting issues considered in the report are: government procurement, intellectual property rights, investment, trade facilitation, labour mobility, free circulation of goods, and competition policy.
While the focus of the assessment is on the economic, social and environmental effects on the EU and Canada, it also assesses the potential impacts on the US, Mexico and a group of other countries/regions including, among others, a variety of developing countries.
The Final Report also includes a section on policy recommendations, also called flanking measures, which are based on the results of the sustainability analyses. These measures cover both enhancement and preventative/mitigation measures, i.e. measures needed to reinforce key positive sustainability impacts and to prevent or at least mitigate major negative sustainability impacts.
Recommendations are presented in two main categories:
Measures related to provisions that will likely be included in CETA (“trade measures”)
Measures, not directly related to provisions in CETA, for cooperation that may accompany the agreement (“cooperation measures”)
The Final Report built on the draft Final Report by considering additional feedback received from stakeholders and the Steering Committee up until the cut-off deadline of 11 April 2011. It used this feedback to refine different sections of the report.
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