Are you happy now?

I remember when Brian Mulroney negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement twenty years ago. The Conservatives won an election on the Free Trade platform in 1988. The people had spoken. The anti-free trade camp accused Mulroney of have sold Canada to the US. And the scoffers scoffed. Free Trade means jobs, they said. The American corporations don’t care about our internal affairs, they said. It’s just good business, they said.

Well, now we have an American chemical company suing the Canadian government over pesticide bans. A foreign corporation is taking the democratically elected government of this country to court in an effort to force the repeal of laws that the people demanded. And they will win. They will win, because according to the NAFTA, they are in the right. YOUR government does not have the right to enact laws that YOU demand if they are detrimental to the business interests of our partners in NAFTA. Of course it’s more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, we the people DO NOT have the final say in how this country is run.

Whether or not you are in favour of the pesticide ban is completely irrelevant. Maybe you are one of those people for whom a pristine lawn is the Holy Grail, and you eagerly await the day when you can put whatever the hell you want on your own damn property, and tell the leftards and ecofreaks to get stuffed. But one day, our government will enact legislation that you support, that benefits you, but that hurts somebody’s business. And if that somebody is powerful enough, they will sue on the grounds that that legislation is a NAFTA violation. And they will WIN. And maybe then you will understand exactly what Brian Mulroney sold when he traded our sovereignty for a little short term economic spinoff.

This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.