The Travelling TPP Roadshow

Brian Innes, president of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance (CAFTA) and tireless retweeter of all things canola, suggests canola growers have a TPP friend in Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland because her dad is a canola grower. 
In a 2012 column in The Atlantic, she mentioned her dad's canola and wheat farm is "seven times the size of Central Park".

In his column in the Hill Times a couple of days ago :

Canada can’t miss the boat on the TPP : As Canadians continue to debate the deal, the rest of the world is not standing still , 

Innes notes the HoC Standing Committee on International Trade kicked off its cross-Canada pre-study public consultations with Canadians in Vancouver on April 18. 

Yes, it's a "full and open pre-study on the merits of TPP" after Canada signed TPP.  
Both Freeland and committee roadshow vice chair and Con MP Randy "Why the TPP is in Canada's best interest" Hoback have explained the TPP cannot be renegotiated - Canada's price of entry to the deal was foregoing the right to either veto or reopen any chapter that had already been concluded. 

So how's that TPP roadshow going?

I went. I saw. I cried for what counts as ‘public consultation’.

Only twelve witnesses were allowed to speak. They were allotted five minutes each. Five of the 12 witnesses represented industry associations and interests. There was only room for 60 members of the public.

By contrast, the Lobbying Commissioner of Canada records Innes' outfit CAFTA held 72 lobbying consultations with Freeland and other Liberal and Conservative MPs leading up to the TPP signing. Or as CAFTA tweeted as Freeland signed it : 
"CAFTA has been engaged throughout #TPP negotiations and had a voice at the table."

As can be seen at left : literally at the table on Feb 3 in Aukland.


Meanwhile yesterday south of the border, origin country of what Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called "the worst trade deal ever":

160+ Farm and Food Groups Ask Congress to Reject TPP, Stand Up for Independent Farmers and Ranchers 
The controversial trade deal will mostly benefit corporate interests.

"The companies — not farmers — capture any export benefits. These companies can use the trade deal to offshore their supply chains and ship farm and food products back to the United States, where the imports compete with products from American farmers."

They are already doing that of course but would like their politicians to agree on some accompanying trade table manners for it. 

President Obama in the NYTimes yesterday : 

“It’s one of the reasons that I pursued the Trans-Pacific Partnership, not because I’m not aware of all the failures of some past trade agreements and the disruptions to our economy that occurred as a consequence of globalization, but rather my assessment that most trends are irreversible given the nature of global supply chains, and so we better be out there shaping the rules in ways that allow for higher labor standards overseas, or try to export our environmental standards overseas so that we have more of a level playing field.”

Pretty sure that's not what the corps promoting this deal on either side of the border have in mind here.
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Microsoft, Christy Clark open foreign worker turnstile outpost in Vancouver

Back in May our media were pretty excited about the jobs jobs jobs angle to Microsoft opening a Centre of Excellence in Vancouver :

CBC : Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre to bring 400 jobs to Vancouver

Vancouver Sun : Microsoft to open new centre in Vancouver, 400 new jobs

HuffPo : Microsoft Canada Announces Vancouver Centre, 400 Jobs

.... all of them pretty obviously based on the same Microsoft press release

Yesterday CBC was somewhat less buoyant about that whole 400 jobs angle, given they will all be going to foreign IT workers :

Foreign workers: Microsoft gets green light from Ottawa for foreign trainees

   Tech giant exempted from new rules for finding Canadians to fill jobs

which garnered some 2500+ furious comments about those jobs not going to Canadians.

As noted here at Creekside last June, truth is those jobs never were going to Canadians. .

Microsoft has been planning to expand their Vancouver sales office since 2007 to circumvent US H1-B immigration restrictions on importing foreign IT specialists :

Amid challenges getting enough foreign programmers admitted into the U.S., Microsoft plans to open a development center in Canada.

"The new software development center will open somewhere in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area and will be "home to software developers from around the world," Microsoft said in a statement on Thursday."The Vancouver area is a global gateway with a diverse population, is close to Microsoft's corporate offices in Redmond, and allows the company to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S.," Microsoft said."

As Microsoft’s deputy general counsel Karen Jones repeated to Businessweek last May : Vancouver Welcomes Tech Companies Hampered by US Work Visa Caps :

“The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs,” she says. “We have to look to other places.” Microsoft opened a small office in Vancouver in 2007, when U.S. visa applications for the first time quickly surpassed the congressional limit. 

Microsoft will hire and train 400 software developers from around the world to work on mobile and cloud projects. Jones says Microsoft didn’t choose to expand in Vancouver “purely for immigration purposes, but immigration is a factor.”

The Canadian government will grant the imported IT workers 24 month visas to work at Microsoft's Centre of Excellence - 12 months more than is required by rules under intra-company transfers before they can be cycled into the US. They are not required to apply for LMIAs due to a special exemption deal between BC and Ottawa, with a special Microsoft exemption on top. Citizenship and Immigration Canada :

"Even though Microsoft’s Rotational Program is generally 18 months in duration, a 24-month work permit will be issued so that the employee may continue to perform Rotational Program job duties until they are transitioned by Microsoft into a new position elsewhere."

So Microsoft gets an immigration turnstile outpost in Vancouver, and in return they promise to hire a few paid Canadian interns.

As also noted here last June, lead lobbyist on this file is frequent CBC Power&Politics panelist Geoff Norquay of Earnscliffe Strategy Group, who formerly worked for both Harper and Mulroney.  Currently lobbying for Microsoft, CIBC, and Shaw, Mr. Norquay has previously represented Monsanto, BC Fish Farmers, Shell, and SNC-Lavalin  :

Client name: Microsoft Canada 

Lobbyist name: Geoff Norquay, Consultant 

Initial registration start date: 2006-04-06 to present

Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada

• Discussions with federal officials in the Departments of Employment and Social Development, Citizenship and Immigration, Industry Canada and Privy Council Office regarding the establishment of the British Columbia Excellence Centre to facilitate entry into Canada of foreign nationals to work in software development on a rotational basis under the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

Meanwhile out here in BC, Christy Clark and her ministers of jobs and technology have been meeting with other Microsoft lobbyists this the past year : "To support Microsoft's efforts to communicate its various activities in BC relating to the recently announcement BC Centre of Excellence in Vancouver."

Microsoft also has several Centres of Excellence in India, Ireland, Cairo, Dubai, etc. 

In July Microsoft announced it was cutting 18,000 jobs or about 14% of its full-time workforce, with further cuts pending to its 80,000 external staff.

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The Tax Free Tour - tax havens and outsourcing

A doc about the stateless offshore world of tax havens. 

Why does Apple only pay 1.9% tax?
The Big Four : Price Waterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG

Former KPMG man : "They are the constant feature of every tax haven. Without one of those firms, or maybe all of those firms being present, you really will not have a tax haven."

He describes how the Big Four as he calls them are hired by governments to guide financial rules that benefit the Big Four.

So remember back in Sept 2011 when Steve gave Deloitte a $20-million contract to advise federal cabinet and senior officials on how to trim $4 billion from government program spending in order to balance the books by 2014?  

Ah -an outsourcing firm is being hired to recommend more outsourcing we said at the time, remembering a 2010 CBC report on the 80% increase in a parallel civil service made up of consulting firms.

At the same time, Deloitte, CORE-outsourcing, and Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of Management teamed up to produce a joint research initiative using Deloitte's "proprietary outsourcing maturity model". It was called The 3 E's of Effective Outsourcing Governance -Experience, Essentials, and Empathy -because that sounds better than Externalizing accountability, Eff Off Unions, and Economic entropy.

They projected that "almost $25 billion worth of outsourcing contracts in Canada [are] to be renewed or renegotiated over the next three years."

Pictured at the top of their 3 E's report are Ray Lavitt, President of CORE; Ian Chan, Principal at Deloitte; and Ron Babin, Professor at Ryerson.  
All three have outsourcing and/or offshoring creds : 

• Lavitt was "VP, Global Sourcing at CIBC" before becoming CEO of CORE
• Chan is "Leader of Deloitte Canada's Outsourcing Advisory Practice" and 
• Babin was "a partner at Accenture and at KPMG", according to his Ryerson bio, and "his area of research is IT Planning and IT Governance with a specific focus on IT outsourcing and off-shore delivery."

Lavitt and Babin featured in an article a month ago at CBC : Offshore outsourcing 'not always a negative thing'

Lavitt is President of CORE; Chan and Babin are CORE board members.

So how did Steve's outsourcing report from Deloitte work out for us?
FinMin Jim Flaherty announced a trim to Ottawa’s annual spending by $5 billion a year in budget cutbacks in programs and services to eliminate the $26-billion deficit by 2015.

As of Dec. 31, 2012, 16,220 public service positions were eliminated, even though according to Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2011 :

Over the past five years, personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79%. While federal departments have had their budgets capped, expenditures on outside consultants have not been touched and remain above $1 billion a year,” says Macdonald.

Wednesday May 8 update : 

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

Thursday May 9 update :
Hundreds of public servants at seven departments received notices today that their jobs are on the block as part of the Conservative government’s ongoing spending cuts

Watch the doc. 
See also International Consortium of Investigative Journalists/offshore
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The invisible hand of the market outsourcing

CBC Go Public's Kathy Tomlinson on The Current :

 "A single mom, an experienced IT worker, couldn't find work for seven months. She heard one of the Indian firms had a project going at one of the banks here so she asked the manager who she knew who was here from India to hire her to oversee it. He said he'd think about it. Then she says he called back to say he would give her the job if she would agree to kickback $8 an hour from her salary to him - a cash commission, he called it. She took the deal because she says she'd rather pay him to work than not have the job."

So Canadians are now having to pay off the insourced scam artists who cost them their jobs to get work at all, even as foreign temporary workers have increased 700% since 2001 and Ottawa is currently inking a trade deal with India to increase labour mobility.

Jason Kenney : 

"Intra-company transfers in the vast majority of cases are a completely normal part of international commerce ... The obligations we have have for intra-company transfars are often hard-wired into trade agreements."

Conspokesbot Kellie Leitch, parlsec for Diane Finley of Human Resources, responds to Anna Maria Tremonti's specific question about companies bypassing government labour market opinions to get fast-tracked on international intra-company transfers :

"The program's intent is not to replace Canadian workers ... We had concerns with respect to what was happening with iGATE and the government acted extremely quickly to begin an investigation to make sure that those labour market opinions were being used appropriately."

which of course entirely bypassed Tremonti's question about employers bypassing LMOs.

Meanwhile in February this year the BC Government Labour Market and Immigration Division was holding classes on how to do it :
(italics mine)

"Is your business experiencing a labour or skills shortage?

If you are an employer interested in learning how to use an alternative approach than the LMO process to recruit and retain foreign workers, this is your chance to find out directly from program staff. "

I guess the BC gov program staff is pretty good at it.
At the now cancelled April 2013 CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE, one of the listed presenters was 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, 
Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, 
whose CORE bio advertized provided "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

And a year ago, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation finalized a $22-million deal with iGATE to provide IT workers for its Road User Safety Modernization Initiative, the department in charge of "road user safety, provincial highways management, and transportation policy and planning including transit." 

Last month iGATE hired a lobbyist to lobby :

• Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)
• Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
• Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)
• Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC)
• Industry Canada (IC)
• Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
• Privy Council Office (PCO

on "the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and proposed government changes to the program."

We'll see how well they do with that.

Northern Reflections : One May Smile  and Smile

with files from : Boycott Royal Bank of Canada and Outsource Canada
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Update : Wednesday, May 8 :

Star investigation: Millions in taxpayer-funded consulting work kept secret

A Star investigation has found 90 per cent of the $2.4 billion paid out in the past decade comes with no description of the work done — and more than a dozen departments refuse to provide details when pressed.

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Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang - Part 4

 "Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones." 

So says CBC's Amanda Lang, senior business correspondent for CBC News and good cop to Kevin O'Leary's bad cop on the Lang and O'Leary Exchange, in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

She wonders if Canadians have returned to 1990 or perhaps to "campaign trail rhetoric in America" - so aghast is she that people are angry about the Royal Bank in-and-outsourcing of Canadian jobs to iGATE in India.  

In her rousing paeon to globalization and "the natural forces of capitalism", she explains :

"a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more."

If you have $699.00 you can hear more of Amanda's thoughts when she gives the keynote address on April 23 at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE :

"CORE's mandate is to help member organizations maximize the value of outsourcing by providing independent and unbiased information ... "

Also presenting will be 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, providing "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

A list of CORE's extensive corp members here, and no, Royal Bank isn't on that list including RBC Financial Group and you'll recognize the rest of them.  
In May, CORE is running a course focusing on "the transition from insourced service delivery to outsourced service delivery and through to steady-state operations".

About that...

Walkom : Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works.
Informative interview with a 10 year veteran of doing it in Canada.

But here's what I don't get, Amanda. If you bring in foreign workers in order to save money and drive down wages in Canada by paying those indentured foreign workers 15% less in a market that just lost 54,500 jobs last month, who is going to be able to to afford to buy the stuff and pay for the services you sent offshore?  

And who is going to look into fixing this for us? The same guy who set it up for us.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1.  


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3


Sunday update : Great post from Laura K @ wmtc on related issues :
Unpaid labour used to be called slavery. Now it's an internship
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Wednesday update : CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/ iGATE - on the milk carton
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Thursday update :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

May 3, 2013   CBC Ombudsman

March 5, 2014 CBC issues no foul no harm report :
Conflict of Interest and CBC News coverage of RBC and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
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The Canada-Jordan FTA - a licence for human trafficking

On Monday the International Trade Committee heard devastating evidence from two witnesses warning that the Canada-Jordan Free Trade Act will merely provide cover for human trafficking and primarily benefit only China and large multinationals like Walmart and Kmart.

Tim Waters, Political Director of United Steelworkers :

"The U.S.-Jordan trade deal immediately descended into the trafficking of tens of thousands of foreign workers to Jordanian factories."

Waters said he had been a champion of passing the US-Jordan FTA in the mistaken belief that it would benefit both US and Jordanian workers and level the international playing field on tarriffs. Instead, on visiting Jordan, he found almost no Jordanians working in the factories there; over 90%, some 30,000+ workers, are all imported.

Factory owners from India, Sri Lanka, and China imprison 'guest' workers from Bangladesh, China, India, Nepal, and the Philippines in compounds in Jordan where they are worked from 12 to 18 hours a day seven days a week in appalling conditions under constant threat of rape, beatings, and deportation.

Locked up after having their passports confiscated at the airport, these indentured labourers have no recourse to the law - despite Lib Scott Brison, FTA pointman for the Cons once again, echoed by Lib Martha Hall Findlay once again, laughably touting the FTA in the House as ensuring :

"following the precedent set by the U.S.-Jordan FTA ... the right to freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, the abolition of child labour, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, and the elimination of discrimination."

Moreover, said Waters, although human rights provisions embedded in the core of the US bill were ignored in Jordan despite the US wielding the big stick of foreign aid, the similar but weaker Canadian safeguards stand to be even less enforceable as they are only part of a side agreement to Bill C-8.

Gosh, another dubious LibroCon labour rights side agreement - just like Brison's previous precious - the Canada-Colombia FTA.

Waters begged the committee members not to make the same mistake in trusting foreign corporations based in Jordan to police their own human and labour rights standards, a decision his union "deeply regrets". It simply does not work, he said.

Charles Kernaghan, U.S. National Labor Committee executive director :

"When the workers signed their three-year contract to go to Jordan, they were told they'd get free food, free health care, free housing --all of it decent. That is not true.

We've seen that with a Canadian apparel company, the Nygard company. It was producing at a factory called International British Garments. In April, when we investigated that factory, 1,200 workers had been stripped of their passports. They were working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night: 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. For the 110 hours of time they were at the factory, they were paid less than half of the minimum wage. They faced sexual harassment, filthy dormitories, and bedbugs."

On top of all that they are charged for their food and have no access to medical attention.

The response to this testimony was about what we've come to expect from this committee.
Liberal MP and moral idiot John Cannis :

"What you're saying is that it's okay if the rest of the world goes and puts on paper firm guidelines and agrees to the wording, and it's firm and it's strong and so on, and says, “Canada, you continue being the boy scout, and we'll continue doing business”.

Waters :

"With all due respect, I don't think that argument holds, simply because you can't say that since everybody else is wrong and everybody else is doing it, then we should too. Had we [United Steelworkers] known what was going to happen, we never would have supported this, okay? We supported it only because we took the deal at face value."

He went on to say that aside from the garment-producing multinationals, the other beneficiary of slave labour in Jordan is China - where the fabric is imported from.

"The U.S.-Jordan free trade agreement actually benefited China more than anyone else: we estimate about $100 million a year in tariff breaks for their textiles to enter the United States. ... By contrast, benefits to US workers were negligible."

Con Gerald Keddy pretends to miss the point that the US-Jordan FTA labour regs are being entirely ignored along with Jordan's own labour laws, and goes with the "mistakes were made" defence :

"You can't come to us and tell us we have to change the rules. Under our agreement on labour cooperation, we have put some very strict guidelines in this agreement. This does not apply simply to Jordanian workers; it also applies to migrant workers and migrant labour. It is under the International Labour Organization's international guidelines and, quite frankly, it recognizes that some of the migrant worker regulatory regime in Jordan has been less than perfect, that there have been some abuses and some mistakes made ...

In our agreement we also have the ability to facilitate the dissemination of information--specifically labour information--to guest workers and migrant workers so that they actually do understand their rights."

Yeah, Keddy, that's the ticket. A pamphlet drop.

Kernaghan responds to Keddy :

"We asked the Jordanian government to allow NGOs in from the countries where the workers are from, from Bangladesh and from Sri Lanka--and that would be the single biggest element--so that the workers would have advocates. They flat out refused."

Con Ed Holder waxes interminably about all the wonderful benefits that will accrue for Canada, despite total trade in merchandise between Canada and Jordan standing at a measly $82 million.

Waters:

"The benefit was for the garment producers in Jordan to have duty-free access into the U.S. market. 86% of the exports from Jordan to the United States are garments. They're at the table here because they want the same duty-free access to the Canadian marketplace that they have to the U.S. marketplace."

Bill C-8, the Canada-Jordan FTA, passed second reading in the House on Sept 27 and is well on its way to being blessed into law by the ConservaLiberal coalition. The International Trade Committee consists of 6 Cons, 3 Libs, 2 Bloc, and 1 NDP, with all 3 Libs having pledged to support it.

Irony Alert : Yesterday Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced proposed legislation to crack down on human trafficking in Canada.

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Superclass : Governing without the shackles of government bureaucracy

A pretty frank discussion on how globalization has facilitated the revolving door between governments, think tanks, the military, arms manufacturers, media conglomerates, lobby groups, and international financial institutions and corporations to build transnational networks. Good guest spots by Christopher Hitchens.

The top 1% of the world's richest own 40% of the planet's global wealth and the top 10% control 85% of its wealth. The top 10 corporations generate 60% of the revenues and employ 59% of the workforce overseas.

One of the panelists is David Rothkopf, Bill Clinton's Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce and former managing director of Kissinger Associates. He is quoted here noting that since Kissinger was National Security Advisor at the White House under Nixon, every national security advisor since then has worked directly or indirectly for Henry Kissinger. On international corps :

"Built to be global, they've influenced the global system and the setting of the rules to assist them in their globalization, whereas countries are like dogs that have those invisible barriers around the yard, you know, they can't get out."

ETA : Notable that all four panellists, two of whom qualify as revolving door insiders themselves, treat the notion of shadow elites as a given, not as some conspiracy theory.

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From SPP to TILMA to "Buy North American"

Harper and Stockwell Day want the provinces to allow US corporations to be allowed to bid on contracts to supply local infrastructure to Canadian municipalities, schools and hospitals. It is their hope, they say, that this "gesture" will convince the US to repeal the "Buy American" provisions in U.S. stimulus legislation.

Not likely it will, of course, but it does provide Harper with yet another opportunity to make concessions to the US that they haven't even asked for.
Currently, because provinces and municipalities are not bound by international trade laws, if they want to give the work to local Canadian joes, they are free to do so. According to Steve and Doris, this is a bad thing. An example given in the G&M is : "Ontario buys only Ontario food for its prisons."

News media reports on this are all assbackwards so I've translated part of one from the G&M for you :

The Canadian government Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives are asking the provinces to join it in creating a new trade deal with the United States conceding even more sovereignty to the US.

Because the 1993 North American free-trade agreement does not include spending by local jurisdictions, contracts across North America involving everything from sewage systems to subway repairs are being awarded outside the framework of continental free trade to local joes.

Mr. Harper said, "Obviously, at a time when we're trying to keep borders open internationally consolidate the power of corporate oligarchy via deep integration, I do think that the proliferation of domestic preferences in subnational government procurement Canadian nationalism and the "Buy Local" movement is really problematic."

Trade Minister Stockwell Day has been canvassing the provinces on the idea of opening up local spending to free trade giving up their local authority, citing the consensus on EU free-trade talks.
The Europeans would not launch the talks until Canadian provinces committed to negotiating a deal that would allow their companies to bid for provincial and municipal contracts on an equal footing. Only Newfoundland refused stood up for Canada.

Day acknowledged the pending EU free trade talks would likely compel the provinces to commit to opening up their procurement sectors further corporate globalization.
"That's really opened the door to the discussion now that we're having with the provinces "Ha, ha, bet you didn't see that one coming," Mr. Day said yesterday.

See Monday's post for how easily we progressed from the SPP and TILMA to the new "Buy North American" proposal.
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Friday Update : The G&M is cranking out two or three headlines of support a day now.
Here's one : "Premiers rally behind Harper in fight against Buy American"
Yeah, two premiers "offered encouragement". Big whoop.
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Genetically modified genocide

DailyMail : GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops

Here's how that works.
India gets IMF loans in exchange for allowing western companies like Monsanto access to the billion strong Indian markets.
Government seed banks ban traditional seeds to promote uptake of GM seeds.
Farmers are pitched the very expensive "magic seeds", Monsanto's BT Cotton.
Farmers take out loans to buy them.
Drought. Too bad because GM seeds require twice the water of traditional seeds.
Crops die and farmers are unable to save seeds to plant next year because of course there are no seeds.
Farmers takes out additional loans to buy more seeds.
More drought plus parasitic bollworms. Crop failure.
Farmers can't pay off loans. Lose land. Suicide.

Monsanto official : "Suicides have always been part of rural Indian life."

Nice. And for what? Are more people fed?
No, because GM crops produce lower yields than traditional plantings.
So the entire purpose of GM is so that a few multinat corpses can own the entire food chain.


Prince Charles is on the case "setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM."
But Prince Charles has his own problems at home :

Independent : Europe's secret plan to boost GM crop production

"Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal.
The documents – minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments – disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them.
And they show that the leaders want "agricultural representatives" and "industry" – presumably including giant biotech firms such as Monsanto – to be more vocal to counteract the "vested interests" of environmentalists"

Currently GM is only grown on .1% - that's point one percent - of agricultural land in Europe : none in Britain, France has suspended cultivation, and resistance is growing in Spain and Portugal.

And Canada? Well, we're riddled with the stuff - one of the world's largest producers of GMs.
A seldom mentioned aspect of the recent listeriosis story was the Ministry of Trade's decision to allow industry to oversee its own labelling, meaning we're unlikely to become better informed of which foods are GM any time soon.

At present GM food labelling in Canada is voluntary.
I'd like to propose a genocide label.