Canadian media is failing citizens on corporate rights deals

[Oscar]

Canadian media is failing citizens with its reporting on corporate rights deals

[ http://rabble.ca/columnists/2016/07/can ... ghts-deals ]

By Murray Dobbin | July 15, 2016

EXCERPT:

Canada's record of investor-state suits

When it comes to signing new investment agreements, Canada is like a barroom brawler who repeatedly goes back to the same bar regardless of how often he gets beaten to a pulp. Canada already has a humiliating record of getting sued by corporations exploiting the ISDS provisions of investment agreements. Out of 129 countries who have signed these agreements, Canada ranks sixth regarding the number of investor-state suits [ http://investmentpolicyhub.unctad.org/isds ] taken against it and has been sued far more often than the U.S. Canadian taxpayers have had to cough up tens of millions of dollars either because tribunals awarded damages against Canada or because our government has given in and paid off companies that have launched investor-state suits.

Yet with CETA, the Canada-EU deal, we are inviting an exponential increase in these lawsuits from the corporations of the 28 EU member states. European corporations love to litigate through investment treaties and are responsible for roughly half of all the cases worldwide, three times the number taken up by U.S. corporations. Seven out of the top 10 countries that are the home base of companies suing under investment treaties are European Union members.

What corporate CEO would sign a contract knowing that it would dramatically increase the odds of their company getting sued? But that's what successive Canadian prime ministers have been eager to do. It would be wrong to think that this is done out of stupidity. If you shift your perspective, and think of government trade officials as negotiating not for us but for corporations, then the behaviour seems quite rational.

Transnational corporations are not content with their existing ability through investor-state suits to force governments to pay if they choose to regulate. Provisions inserted into CETA will help corporations strangle regulations in their cribs.

Corporate rights over regulations

Among CETA's many affronts to democracy is how it dictates foreign involvement in domestic decision-making about new regulations, even when these regulations would not treat foreign companies any differently than domestic ones. CETA actually guarantees foreign corporations ("persons" in trade lingo) the right to participate in public consultations about proposed regulations on terms no less favourable than provided to Canadian citizens.

Picture a post-CETA Canadian hearing on bottled water standards and imagine seats at the table automatically reserved for European corporations like Evian. If you find it hard to believe that trade officials would forever erode Canadian democracy in this way, read the wording for yourself in the actual CETA text posted by the government: p. 19, Article 4.6.1. [ http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2 ... 154329.pdf ]

Seriously, you need to read this.

Canadians are being portrayed by our media as good little globalizers, supportive of these agreements in contrast with the badly behaved Brexiters and Trump and Sanders supporters. But a recent Angus Reid poll [ https://www.angusreidforum.com/Admin/me ... /NAFTA.pdf ] revealed that just one in four Canadians think NAFTA has been good for the country and that we should keep the deal as-is. Forty per cent think it has been bad for workers and 60 per cent think it has mostly benefitted corporations. Just eight per cent think Canada got the best deal of the three NAFTA countries.

But if the elite journalists can't bear to listen to the unwashed, angry masses, perhaps they would listen to someone with impeccable elite credentials: Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary and former chief economist with the World Bank. In a July 6 article in the Financial Times [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/15598db8-4456 ... z4EXOnbUgR ] , Summers executed one of the most dramatic turn-arounds in support for these agreements. Summers stated that if we replaced "reflex internationalism" with "responsible nationalism" then "international agreements would be judged not by how much is harmonized or by how many barriers are torn down but whether citizens are empowered." By that standard, the new agreements that Trudeau and the media cheerleaders are pushing are a disaster. Until Hall, Saunders and Ibbitson do some serious study of these agreements, maybe they should quit writing about them.

- - - - -

Murray Dobbin has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for 40 years. He writes rabble's State of the Nation column.