Let’s consider an important question about the Foreign
Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) between Canada and China.
Why was there debate after signing - and ratification – not before?
Prime Minister Harper signed the deal in Russia on 9
September 2012. It appears that the arrangement was made with an authoritarian
country in another authoritarian country by an authoritarian Prime Minister.
The deal sat in limbo for two years until it was recently ratified
on 12 September by Cabinet, not by Parliament, despite the fact that it is a 31
year contract – with no chance for abrogation until the 15th year. Clearly the Chinese government views things
long term – in the light of (multiple) “Five Year Plans”. Canada’s Free Trade
agreement with the United States (NAFTA), negotiated under the Mulroney
government, was a national election issue and requires only six months’ notice
for Canada to exit the agreement.
Here we see the difference between dealing with the authoritarian
planning of an emerging superpower in Beijing and how two asymmetrical and elected
democracies came to terms under a negotiated NAFTA. So it appears that Harper folded before
Chinese government interests. No debate in Canada means no chance of loss of
face for China. And in the interest of the
apparent ascendancy of a binding economic treaty (autonomous from Canadian
democracy now liable to be sued) Harper sacrificed Parliament (this time there
was no need to prorogue) again absolving it of its primary function to parler (talk). (By the way, the Speaker of the House of
Commons should be made aware of this latter point).
In defence of themselves, and the Canadian public, the
Hupacaseth First Nation in B.C. challenged FIPA by means of federal court
action, demonstrating that our legal system is the true conservative force in
the nation. That action was still
unresolved when FIPA was ratified, another boot to the rule of law by Harper (following Hobbes who wrote against Sir Edward Coke, admirer of the Magna Carta and legal mind behind the Petition of Right of 1628).
Notice also the timing of the ratification. It came on a no
news Friday afternoon just days after Harper joyously announced the discovery
of one of the Franklin ships. Harper
leveraged his “national sovereignty” capital from the Franklin discovery and
applied it to the widely-disdained, secretive FIPA. Besides, Canada’s warlord had been outwitted
by ancient Chinese warlords, and Harper needed to shore up a strained
relationship, certainly in order to travel to China this November, for the
planned meeting with APEC leaders.
Parliament’s non-debate on a 31-year-agreement is an ominous
sign, worse than Harper’s multiple omnibus bills. Consider the French liberal thinker
(and traveller) Alexis de Tocqueville who warned of the likes of our authoritarian
Prime Minister in his Democracy in
America (1835): “I foresee that if we fail to establish among us the
peaceful authority of the majority in time, sooner or later we shall arrive at
the boundless power of one man.”[1]
[1]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, tr. Gerald E. Bevan, intro. by Isaac Kramnick (Toronto: Penguin,
2003), pp. 369,370.
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