Elissa Smith, a 20-year-old Ottawa trade enthusiast watching her first World Trade Organization negotiating pressure cooker in person, marvelled at the process that regularly employs fatigue to gain agreements.
Some would call it surrender.
“It is a shame that decisions that are so important are being made by people who are sleep deprived,” she said. “It seems to be the survival of the fittest.”
At least, it is the survival of those with the most stamina.
Days of endless meetings with other ministers, journalists and the army of lobbyists on site regularly are followed by so-called “green room” negotiations that can last until close to morning.
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Increasingly thick-tongued negotiators and ministers regularly appear to try to explain overnight developments in an evolving and twisted plot.
“It really is a process of trying to stay alert enough to keep your eye on the ball and to follow the arguments and manoeuvres of others when all you really want to do is crawl into bed,” veteran Canadian negotiator Gerry Shannon said after the last round of world trade talks in which he was a pivotal Canadian player.
Canadian ministers and negotiators have an added time burden.
Canada sends by far the largest contingent of non-governmental lobbyists and twice a day to keep them satisfied that they are in the loop, they are briefed on latest developments.
These briefings follow a familiar pattern. Ministers or officials offer comments about topics under negotiation or positions being defended and then partisans on both sides of Canada’s agricultural divide line up to press their position that Canada must not let their point of view be eclipsed.
If a supply management sector representative asks about defence of over-quota tariffs, a member of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance is at the microphone to insist that their call for aggressive defence of tariff cuts be emphasized.
It is a positioning issue which sees the competing lobbyists working the hallways and meeting rooms, looking for allies and making sure that all within hearing know that their perspective on what is needed is Canada’s perspective. This divided Canadian loyalty occasionally is raised at the negotiating table by other countries regularly lobbied by competing Canadian groups.
Last week, amid a flurry of meetings with other like-minded lobby groups, National Farmers Union women’s president Colleen Ross spoke at a non-governmental session organized to explain and defend supply management, with Canadian supply management officials in the audience.
At another venue in the city, Canadian business leader and former Conservative cabinet minister Perrin Beatty told a Hong Kong audience that Canada’s attempt to defend both export interests and domestic-sensitive product protection undermined business trade interests.
And CAFTA president Liam McCreery, an Ontario grains and oilseeds producer, appeared at a news conference with like-minded farm leaders from countries including the United States, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to plead for an aggressive subsidy and tariff-cutting result.
