Librarians Against the WTO was created in the summer of 2003 by Danielle Dennie, an MLIS student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in order to generate interest in and discussion on the topic of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its neoliberal agenda.

We are a grassroots movement, moblizing librarians around issues that affect them. More specifically, our mandate is to provide information about the consequences of the WTO, and most notably one of its agreements, the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), to libraries, the library profession and the general public.

By our actions, we hope to inspire others to create similar grassroots organizations to defend and protect publicly funded institutions such as educational institutions, heatlh services, water services, etc...

Objectives:

1. To offer resources for librarians, information professionals and all citizens, on the effect of the GATS on publicly funded libraries and the library profession as a whole.
2. To collectivize our efforts in order to make our demands known to the government and the WTO.
3. To creatively and energetically resist the push towards a neoliberal world agenda where governments, and by extension, citizens, are excluded from decisions that affect, among other things, access to free information, the acquisition of knowledge, education, health, and the environment.

Goal:

To get the Canadian Government to exclude libraries or information services from the GATS.

For more information:

Please write to: lawtoinfo AT yahoo DOT ca