Six Tough Questions about the China Trade Deal
Gus Van Harten, author of ‘Sold Down the Yangtze,’ breaks down the FIPA’s impacts.
In a conversation with Andrew Nikiforuk, Van Harten answered six questions about the trade agreement, which the Harper government finalized last year.
Andrew Nikiforuk: Investor-state arbitration is a new tool in the relentless economic march of globalization. What new threats does this foreign investor protection system pose to a democracy?
Gus Van Harten: In Canada, we can elect a government, and the government is subject to the Constitution and Canadian laws, as interpreted by Canadian courts. That’s our democracy.
But the federal government is signing more and more trade agreements that expand a system of “investor-state arbitration,” or what I describe in the book as a world pseudo court. The purpose of the pseudo court is to protect foreign investors, meaning usually the world’s wealthiest companies and people, from the rest of us. Instead of public courts, you now have private lawyers sitting as “arbitrators” with the power to decide how much Canadians must pay to compensate foreign investors for our country’s decisions.
Basically, the power of Canada’s legislatures and judges is being shifted to large companies and wealthy individuals and to a small group of lawyers. The shift is anti-democratic because it will be very difficult for future governments to reverse. Even so, governments can still do things to limit the damage, as I explain in the book.
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