Why is Trudeau following Harper's lead . . .?

[Oscar]

Why is Trudeau following Harper's lead and giving special protections to powerful corporations?

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By Linda McQuaig | September 1, 2016

Foreign investors -- including some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful corporations -- typically generate little public sympathy and aren't usually lumped in with groups deemed worthy of special protections.

So the Trudeau government, which is in the process of granting wealthy foreign investors extraordinary legal protections and access to public money, is probably hoping the public isn't paying much attention.

The special privileges for investors are a key part of CETA, the Canada-Europe trade deal, which Justin Trudeau is planning to sign in Brussels in October.

Opposition to the deal -- particularly the investor protections -- is raging across Europe, with almost 3.5 million Europeans signing a petition against CETA and a similar trade deal being negotiated with the United States.

Here in Canada, however, resistance has been fairly muted, particularly after the contentious investor protections were revised last February, in response to pressure from European social democratic parties.

Those revisions made some improvements in the deeply flawed process, but the special privileges for investors, known as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), remain essentially intact. Investors will still be able to bring lawsuits over government policies they don't like, and their lawsuits will still be decided by special tribunals where they will enjoy stronger legal protections than are available to any other group in domestic or international law.

Thus, despite the revisions, CETA will undermine Canadian democracy, handing foreign corporations a powerful lever for pressuring our governments to, for instance, abandon environmental, health or financial regulations, while leaving Canadian taxpayers potentially on the hook to pay billions of dollars in compensation to some of the wealthiest interests on earth.

The ISDS privileges, which have become increasingly common in trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Deal (NAFTA), help explain why corporations have become so powerful in recent years.

It's often lamented that corporations now rule the world -- a development typically attributed to forces beyond our control, like globalization and computer technology.

But corporate giants stalk the earth not because of forces beyond our control, but because we've changed laws in ways that empower them and restrict the power of our governments to regulate them. The ISDS privileges are a prime example.
But here's the key point: we could change the laws to empower ourselves. But it's difficult to get politicians to stand up to corporate interests.

Canada is a case in point.

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