In today's global economy, you no
longer need nuclear weapons to destroy or take over another country;
you can just sue them to death under free trade agreements.
In my youth, we used to fear
intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with multiple nuclear
warheads that could destroy us all in a matter of minutes. Today, we
shudder at the thought that some refugees might want to bomb or shoot
up a Canadian mall or movie house.
But the real threat to our sovereignty
and control over our own lives is planeloads of lawyers representing
transnational corporations seeking to tear down our environmental,
food safety and labour laws — or any laws that might potentially
reduce their profits.
Their tool is ISDS: Investor-to-State
Dispute Settlement rules buried within our free trade agreements.
Canada has recently completed
negotiations on two huge international trade deals. But there's a
good chance neither the Canada Europe Trade Agreement nor the Trans
Pacific Partnership will be ratified — at least not in their
present form.
“Their present form” ought to be
moot, because officially, the negotiations are over. Canada has
signed on in principle to both. Officially, no country is supposed to
be able to re-open negotiations, only to ratify, or not ratify.
But in news reports from Europe, where
prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet are working hard to
sell our diversity and resourcefulness, diplomats are working to
re-work the wording on CETA, in order to save it.
CETA is not a done deal, and may never
get done, because hundreds of thousands of Europeans don't want their
national parliaments to cede sovereignty over their air, water,
labour laws, food safety, health care and natural resources to
foreign corporate interests.
Huffington Post reported last year that
Canada is the most-sued nation in the developed world. Under Chapter
11 of the North America Free Trade Act, American companies have
launched no less than 35 claims against us, seeking something in the
order of $6 billion in damages.
Why? For banning fracking of gas wells
in Quebec, for one thing, when people got nervous about its effects
on water. Or for another, a national ban on neurotoxin MMT (a
gasoline additive). Or for insisting that PCB wastes be disposed in
proper facilities as prescribed by another international treaty. Or
that Newfoundland and Labrador took back some water and hydro rights
on land after a pulp and paper company closed its last mill in the
area and moved out. Or when local resistance persuaded the Ontario
government to refuse a permit for a company to develop a quarry, over
concerns regarding groundwater contamination.
American companies have a 100-per-cent
success rate in suing Canada. Huffington Post reports it's cost us
about $65 million so far to defend against these lawsuits, in which
we've had to change laws to suit the companies and/or pay penalties
so far of about $170 million. More suits are pending.
Maude Barlow of the Council of
Canadians goes further (you had to know she would). She says that
under NAFTA, CETA or the TPP, companies could forbid Canadian
provinces or dozens of other nations from raising their minimum wage,
for instance. Or they could insist that Canada allow the sale of milk
products containing bovine growth hormone, which is currently illegal
in Canada.
A national Buy Canadian policy?
Couldn't happen.
She's in Europe right now with all the
bigwigs at Davos and talking to local interest groups in various
European countries,warning them against the dangers of signing away
their sovereignty so that powerful corporations can guarantee
themselves higher profits.
News reports now suggest the message is
being heard — and the European agreement is in danger. American
lawmakers are angry that corporate lobbyists saw the text of TPP long
before the deal was done and are raising a stink about loss of U.S.
sovereignty. If the U.S. doesn't ratify — and tells us why — TPP
is dead.
CETA needs to be ratified by all the
countries concerned. That means it must be translated into 23
languages, and all the different copies must agree on what the deal
means, legally.
That's the window through which
European diplomats are talking to Canadian diplomats right now. The
ISDS portion of CETA needs to be watered down so that nations can
remain in control of their own laws, social policies and
environments.
In other words, still call themselves
nations and not branch offices.
The global economy has already changed
how we all live. You can't can't build a blue jean factory in Canada
without competing against child labour costs in Asia.
But our water is still our water. Our
forests are still our forests and wild areas. We've already given up
ownership of oil and gas resources, but we don't need to give up the
right to develop green energy technologies within our borders as a
result.
In the alphabet soup of international
deals, ISDS could be the ICBM that either nukes our notions of
nationhood, or the deals themselves.
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