Your Mail in Court

That old NAFTA spectre of Chapter 11 is rearing its ugly head again. The good people at UPS believe that Canadians don’t deserve a publicly owned parcel delivery service, and they’ll sue the packages off us to make that point.

Thanks to a little NAFTA clause called Investor Rights, corporations can sue governments if they feel they are being treated unfairly. In 1998, Canada paid the Ethyl Corporation millions of dollars because we didn’t allow them to put the banned, toxic additive MMT into our gasoline.

As I type, Council of Canadians are in court in a battle to uphold the Canadian constitution. Lawyer for the CoC, Steven Shrybman puts it like this:

“It’s the first case to question whether or not Canada’s obligations under NAFTA actually are compatible with our own constitutional arrangements and norms. Foreign investors have been given the right to invoke international dispute processes that operate entirely behind closed doors and outside the framework of Canadian law and our court system.” – CBC.ca

You can let International Trade Minister, Jim Peterson, know how you feel about this via the Council’s website.

This case promises to be a big one. Hopefully someone will get punched in court that way it might actually make onto the TV news. After all it’s only our constitution at stake. Obviously the news has better things to talk about.