Corporate Canada's Best Friend

In yet another sign that, for Stephen Harper, profits come before people, the Globe and Mail reports that Ottawa is signaling a radical shift in foreign aid:

The federal government is signalling a profound shift in its approach to foreign aid that could see Canada’s international development agency align itself more closely with the private sector and work more explicitly to promote Canada’s interests abroad.

A recent House of Commons committee report suggests that CIDA partner with private corporations:

Stephen Brown, who teaches international development at the University of Ottawa, said CIDA has not dramatically shifted its spending toward private-sector partnerships. “But in terms of signals and signs of things to come, [the shift] is quite profound,” he said.

Last year, the aid agency matched three mining companies with NGOs to work on jobs training, education and clean water projects in specific African and Latin American mining communities. CIDA says the strategy will help leverage corporate investments to bolster development goals, while critics suggest it leads the agency away from its core strategy.

Dr. Brown said some partnerships with the private sector can be useful, but questioned Canada’s eagerness to work with the extractive industry when mining rarely offers much benefit to the communities in which it occurs. “If our real goal is poverty reduction, that’s not the strategy we would choose,” he said.

The foreign aid initiative isn't surprising. After all, poverty reduction at home isn't one of Harper's goals. Why would he try to reduce poverty abroad?

He is, however, being true to form. He is corporate Canada's best friend.

Corporate Rule

Frances Russell lays bare what is really going on behind the Harper government's trade agenda:

Their real purpose is to repeal democracy, to elevate investor/corporate rights over the democratic will of the people. Corporations — not governments — become the decision-makers, the de facto rulers.

This corporate coup d’etat is being accomplished through Orwellian investor rights clauses empowering corporations to sue governments, often for astronomical sums, should governments enact any laws for the public good that constrain corporate interests.

The odious concept that corporate rights should trump democratic rights was pioneered in the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated and signed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government.

To underscore her point, she reviews the record under NAFTA:

To date, Canada has faced over 30 investor-state claims under NAFTA, lost or settled five cases, been forced to pay over $157 million in damages and incurred tens of millions more in legal costs. Mexico has paid out $187 million. But the U.S. — which wrote the rules and has property rights entrenched in its constitution, unlike its two trade partners — has never lost a case and thus has paid nothing.

The real problem, she writes, is that these disputes are handled behind closed doors and rarely go before a judge:

The arbitrators are often corporate lawyers. They lack judicial independence, training and experience. They tend to favour corporations over governments. There is an open bias in the process. Investors can sue governments but governments cannot sue investors.

And that is the heart of the problem: governments cannot act to defend the rights of citizens. Welcome to corporate rule.

The Problem of Political Courage

Chantal Hebert argues in today's Toronto Star that the repatriation of the Constitution in 1981 unleashed a tide of populism which has paralyzed Canada's parliamentary institutions:

In the three decades since the patriation conference, the parties and the politicians who have espoused the new culture of populism have thrived; those who clung to the old ways have wilted. Canada’s traditional parties were in the latter category. So were the country’s parliamentary institutions.

Perhaps. But it's also quite possible that the problem lies not in the institutions so much as in the leaders who followed patriation. Much more saliently, Hebert writes:

Over the past 30 years, political courage has become a rarer commodity in Canada. As in the case of other more tangible commodities, the rule that if you don’t use it you lose it applies to this near-extinct virtue.

She claims that the two phenomena are linked: the rise of populism has led to a decline in political courage. Our leaders have, indeed, lacked political courage. But I'm not convinced that populism is to blame. To begin with, the so called populist revolt has given us Stephen Harper, one of the most dictatorial prime ministers in this nation's history. One would think that populism would serve as a check on the prime minister's power.

Secondly, Hebert takes no notice of the corporatist forces which have grabbed the reins of power in almost every Western democracy. The corporatist agenda has led to our present crisis. Populism is not the cause of our problems. The concentration of wealth and power got us into this mess.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are part of an almost universal populist movement. Rather than causing our problems, populism may be what gets us out of this mess -- provided our political leaders can rediscover the true meaning of courage.