Rick Mercer rant on Stephen Harper’s secretive investment treaty (FIPA) with China

Yes, more video and more departure from design, but on the topic of seeming departures from design, read the “About.” It’s hard to concentrate on design niceties while the country is going to hell in a handbasket. Which it most unprecedentedly is. The Prime Minister may not as stupid as Romney, but is just as dangerous and crazy.

Canada is about to sign the biggest trade treaty in a generation, the biggest since NAFTA, and the PM is going to do this in secret without any debate in parliament. This treaty, known as FIPA (or FIPPA) has to be stopped.

It will make it extremely difficult for us to introduce any new environmental or economic regulation in future without making ourselves subject to lawsuits and fines from China, as it will be free to argue that such regulations cripple its existing interests in Canada – in the tar sands or in mining for example. Not only will be subject to these, but all of the proceedings will happen not in Canadian courts but in entirely secret processes about which the Canadian public will, by the terms of the treaty, know nothing.

Go here if you want to make your opposition known (and you should). The MP spearheading this fight, and doing it brilliantly is Elizabeth May, though it’s not clear whether she can stop it. You can support her too. May has backup from top Canadian investment treaty experts and constitutional lawyers, but sadly we have a government that doesn’t listen to rational argument, or even engage in it. Or any kind of discussion whatsoever, apparently. How can we be signing an investment treaty of this magnitude without a single debate in parliament?

More here. I’m just hoping that people haven’t been so distracted by the US election that this extremely critical development has flown beneath their radar.

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