Don’t be fooled. The innocuous language used to describe the avalanche of so-called “trade” agreements raining down on Canada under the Harper government — the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Canada-China Foreign Investment Agreement, not to mention the plethora of single-country trade deals — aren’t about trade at all.
Their real purpose is to repeal democracy, to elevate investor/corporate rights over the democratic will of the people. Corporations — not governments — become the decision-makers, the de facto rulers.
This corporate coup d’etat is being accomplished through Orwellian investor rights clauses empowering corporations to sue governments, often for astronomical sums, should governments enact any laws for the public good that constrain corporate interests.
The odious concept that corporate rights should trump democratic rights was pioneered in the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated and signed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government.
To date, Canada has faced over 30 investor-state claims under NAFTA, lost or settled five cases, been forced to pay over $157 million in damages and incurred tens of millions more in legal costs. Mexico has paid out $187 million. But the U.S. — which wrote the rules and has property rights entrenched in its constitution, unlike its two trade partners — has never lost a case and thus has paid nothing.
Two new NAFTA lawsuits were launched recently against Canada by U.S. corporations. Lone Pine Resources filed a notice of intent to sue Canada for $250 million over Quebec’s June 2011 decision to impose a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for shale gas under the St. Lawrence River. The company complains Quebec’s legislation expressly prohibits payment for this “expropriation.”
Windstream Energy is suing Canada for $475 million over Ontario’s decision to place a moratorium on the construction of new wind energy projects. Windstream was seeking to set up a wind farm at Wolfe Island Shoals on Lake Ontario.
Amounts like these are considerable, even for a First World country like Canada. Imagine the predicament of Ecuador, which has a per capita income of $8,100 and a Gross Domestic Product of $67 billion but is facing a $1.76 billion lawsuit by Occidental Petroleum over the expropriation of oil investment.
In 2010, two Canadian law professors, Gus Van Harten of Osgoode Hall Law School and David Schneiderman of the University of Toronto, spearheaded something called a ‘Public Statement on The International Investment Regime’. It drew the signatures of 48 academics from Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia, China, Finland, Austria, Germany, Singapore and Thailand.
The statement warns that investor rights clauses grant corporations the right to repeal the ability of citizens and their governments to enact laws for the public good. They take the world back to the pre-democratic era — only this time it’s multi-billion-dollar corporations, not colonial powers or feudal lords, calling the shots.
Investment treaty arbitration is not fair, independent or balanced.
“They are the most important legal mechanisms to regulate countries since the colonial period, established mainly to protect the interests of large corporations,” Van Harten said in an interview. “The fines and penalties they impose are similar to the legal measures imperial powers once used to discipline new or semi-independent countries. Big corporations now use similar mechanisms to threaten governments.”
The statement’s signatories explicitly cautioned against entrenching investor rights clauses in the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, saying they raise concerns for “democratic choice, policy-making flexibility and judicial independence.”
One example suffices to highlight the danger. European Union negotiators are determined to protect the lengthy patents enjoyed by their pharmaceutical industry. Such extended patent protection could increase Canadians’ drug bills by as much as $900 million to $1 billion annually — a significant blow not just to consumers, but also to provincial drug plans.
Since NAFTA is the template for this new investor-state jurisprudence, it is important that citizens realize how far removed it is from the rule of law in First World democracies.
Many of NAFTA’s Chapter 11 arbitrations are held in secret. They are presided over not by judges, but by arbitrators appointed by investors (corporations), governments or the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
The arbitrators are often corporate lawyers. They lack judicial independence, training and experience. They tend to favour corporations over governments. There is an open bias in the process. Investors can sue governments but governments cannot sue investors.
All three NAFTA governments have incurred tens of millions of dollars in legal costs already. And the lawsuits keep coming.
“The situation has become a legal and economic minefield, with governments often finding that the best interests of their citizens are trumped by the ability of multinationals to make profits,” says the study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “All levels of government are being pressured to fall into step with the will of foreign investors.”
More ominous — given the sheer number of FIPP (Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection) deals the current government is eagerly pursuing with little or no debate either in Parliament or the public — is the chill such predetermined controls place on future public policy making.
It isn’t hard to imagine how almost anything a government might want to do to improve the lives of its citizens might be abandoned on the drawing board for fear of abridging some company’s corporate rights.
“The threat of incurring large financial penalties to compensate foreign investors for losses stemming from regulatory measures casts a significant chill over policy-making,” the CCPA study says.
“In effect, NAFTA (and all future so-called ‘free trade’ deals) establishes a private justice system exclusively for foreign investors, including the world’s largest and most powerful multinational corporations.”
In plain language, that means this new form of international “trade” pact repeals huge tracts of the democratic commons — the right of citizens through their elected representatives to determine the management and direction of their society.
It’s a recipe for corporate rule, plain and simple.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frances Russell
Their real purpose is to repeal democracy, to elevate investor/corporate rights over the democratic will of the people. Corporations — not governments — become the decision-makers, the de facto rulers.
This corporate coup d’etat is being accomplished through Orwellian investor rights clauses empowering corporations to sue governments, often for astronomical sums, should governments enact any laws for the public good that constrain corporate interests.
The odious concept that corporate rights should trump democratic rights was pioneered in the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated and signed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government.
To date, Canada has faced over 30 investor-state claims under NAFTA, lost or settled five cases, been forced to pay over $157 million in damages and incurred tens of millions more in legal costs. Mexico has paid out $187 million. But the U.S. — which wrote the rules and has property rights entrenched in its constitution, unlike its two trade partners — has never lost a case and thus has paid nothing.
Two new NAFTA lawsuits were launched recently against Canada by U.S. corporations. Lone Pine Resources filed a notice of intent to sue Canada for $250 million over Quebec’s June 2011 decision to impose a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for shale gas under the St. Lawrence River. The company complains Quebec’s legislation expressly prohibits payment for this “expropriation.”
Windstream Energy is suing Canada for $475 million over Ontario’s decision to place a moratorium on the construction of new wind energy projects. Windstream was seeking to set up a wind farm at Wolfe Island Shoals on Lake Ontario.
Amounts like these are considerable, even for a First World country like Canada. Imagine the predicament of Ecuador, which has a per capita income of $8,100 and a Gross Domestic Product of $67 billion but is facing a $1.76 billion lawsuit by Occidental Petroleum over the expropriation of oil investment.
In 2010, two Canadian law professors, Gus Van Harten of Osgoode Hall Law School and David Schneiderman of the University of Toronto, spearheaded something called a ‘Public Statement on The International Investment Regime’. It drew the signatures of 48 academics from Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia, China, Finland, Austria, Germany, Singapore and Thailand.
The statement warns that investor rights clauses grant corporations the right to repeal the ability of citizens and their governments to enact laws for the public good. They take the world back to the pre-democratic era — only this time it’s multi-billion-dollar corporations, not colonial powers or feudal lords, calling the shots.
Investment treaty arbitration is not fair, independent or balanced.
“They are the most important legal mechanisms to regulate countries since the colonial period, established mainly to protect the interests of large corporations,” Van Harten said in an interview. “The fines and penalties they impose are similar to the legal measures imperial powers once used to discipline new or semi-independent countries. Big corporations now use similar mechanisms to threaten governments.”
The statement’s signatories explicitly cautioned against entrenching investor rights clauses in the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, saying they raise concerns for “democratic choice, policy-making flexibility and judicial independence.”
One example suffices to highlight the danger. European Union negotiators are determined to protect the lengthy patents enjoyed by their pharmaceutical industry. Such extended patent protection could increase Canadians’ drug bills by as much as $900 million to $1 billion annually — a significant blow not just to consumers, but also to provincial drug plans.
Since NAFTA is the template for this new investor-state jurisprudence, it is important that citizens realize how far removed it is from the rule of law in First World democracies.
Many of NAFTA’s Chapter 11 arbitrations are held in secret. They are presided over not by judges, but by arbitrators appointed by investors (corporations), governments or the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
The arbitrators are often corporate lawyers. They lack judicial independence, training and experience. They tend to favour corporations over governments. There is an open bias in the process. Investors can sue governments but governments cannot sue investors.
All three NAFTA governments have incurred tens of millions of dollars in legal costs already. And the lawsuits keep coming.
“The situation has become a legal and economic minefield, with governments often finding that the best interests of their citizens are trumped by the ability of multinationals to make profits,” says the study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “All levels of government are being pressured to fall into step with the will of foreign investors.”
More ominous — given the sheer number of FIPP (Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection) deals the current government is eagerly pursuing with little or no debate either in Parliament or the public — is the chill such predetermined controls place on future public policy making.
It isn’t hard to imagine how almost anything a government might want to do to improve the lives of its citizens might be abandoned on the drawing board for fear of abridging some company’s corporate rights.
“The threat of incurring large financial penalties to compensate foreign investors for losses stemming from regulatory measures casts a significant chill over policy-making,” the CCPA study says.
“In effect, NAFTA (and all future so-called ‘free trade’ deals) establishes a private justice system exclusively for foreign investors, including the world’s largest and most powerful multinational corporations.”
In plain language, that means this new form of international “trade” pact repeals huge tracts of the democratic commons — the right of citizens through their elected representatives to determine the management and direction of their society.
It’s a recipe for corporate rule, plain and simple.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frances Russell
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