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ARTICLE · 17 MAY 2013

Canada Loses WTO Appeal Regarding Ontario's Feed-In Tariff (FIT) Program

Stikeman Elliott LLP
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The World Trade Organization has released its official ruling on Canada’s Appeal regarding Ontario’s Green Energy Act and its Feed-in Tariff program.

CanadaEnergy and Natural Resources
Susan Hutton
Susan Hutton
Eric Bremermann
Eric Bremermann
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As an update to our previous post, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has released its official ruling on Canada's Appeal regarding Ontario's Green Energy Act and its Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program. On Monday May 6, the WTO Appellate Body upheld the complaints from the European Union (EU) and Japan, stating that Ontario's Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program discriminates against foreign suppliers of equipment and components for renewable energy facilities by requiring minimum thresholds for domestic content levels, and is not saved as government procurement.

To quickly summarize the claim, the EU and Japan first appealed to the WTO in 2011 claiming that the FIT program violated three WTO conventions: Article III:4 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; Article 2.1 of the Trade-Related Investment Measures Agreement; and Articles 3.1(b) and 3.2 of the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement (SCM). Specifically, Japan and the EU argued that the domestic content

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